You Bastard / Video Games

You Bastard! in Video Games.

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• The Stanley Parable has a Take That! at video games that use this trope. The Lemony Narrator, trying to make a more appealing game for the player, decides to have you play a minigame where you must continuously press a button to stop a cardboard baby from going into a fire. Now, both the baby and the button pushing are extremely annoying, and since to win the minigame you have to play it for FOUR HOURS, it's pretty much forcing you to let the baby die. And when you do, the narrator calls you out on it and asks if you hate babies or just hate him. Even though he basically forced you to do it in the first place.
  Narrator: You heartless bastard!
  • Interestingly, you can actually win this minigame, and in a case of magnificent Developer's Foresight, there's actually a unique ending for doing so. Watch it here.
• God of War's Kratos.
  • The series he is in is based on Greek Mythology, which means you end up with Protagonist-Centred Morality a lot of the time. The player has to do completely heartless things like smash a person's head on an altar, which the player drags him to while he is screaming "No! No! Get away from me!" (this is from the second game). There is no way he could have resisted.
  • In the first game, Kratos is a champion of the Gods, in the second, he is a champion of the Titans, who eventually kills the fates, which gives him the ability of time travel. This may sound fine, but the level of bloody violence is so much so it was mentioned on the back cover. Then again, at that time morality was different, and they are not afraid to show some of it. Also, Kratos commits an act of treachery at the beginning of the second game. The plot revolves around being evil. Just look at the page mentioned above for more examples.
  • However, in the third game several characters (most notably Hermes) tell him how much of a bastard he is, as well as him gaining a Morality Pet in Pandora. It actually affects him enough that he makes a slight Heel–Face Turn towards the end.
• Mocked in Borderlands 2 with the Morningstar sniper rifle, a gun awarded to you by the MegaCorp Hyperion. A gun for "murderers... like you!" It has a high-pitched, shrill voice that whines at you for killing psychopaths, robbers, pirates, and vicious creatures by saying that they could have had a bad day or that they just wanted to feed their family, and that serial killers thought THEY were good people, too! Anthony Burch, Borderlands 2's writer, commented on the tendency of games like Spec Ops The Line to do this.
• In Ninja Gaiden 3 this happens quite often. For example, after slaughtering the very first group of enemies in the game, a single mook decides that it'd be a better idea to surrender rather than get slaughtered by Ryu Hayabusa, and begs Ryu not to kill him, pleading that he was just trying to feed his family. However, you have to kill him anyway to proceed. Most enemies also tend to crawl in pain screaming "I don't wanna die!" if you don't Mercy Kill them.
  • The Updated Re-release Razor's Edge drops this aspect completely, going back to NG2's formula of dismembered enemies trying to grab you in a suicide attack. and removing the aforementioned scene.
• The Last of Us is set twenty years into the Zombie Apocalypse and forces the player to make a lot of morally-questionable decisions, and is called out for it multiple times. This comes to a head in the finale, when you choose to save the life of Ellie, the immune girl you've come to think of as a daughter, rather than allow her brain to be harvested to create a vaccine for the zombie plague to save humanity. At one point, you find a recording from one of the surgeons who rejoices at finding a cure, comparing it to the discovery of penicillin. After you manage to retrieve Ellie and carry her out of the hospital, you are confronted by Marlene, who calls you out for being selfish and points out that Ellie would've been willing to make the sacrifice. You respond by shooting Marlene in the stomach, and then escaping with Ellie.
  Surgeon #1: I won't let you take her. This is our future. Think of all the lives we'll save. (Joel shoots him)
  Surgeon #2: No! You fucking animal!
• The Last of Us Part 2's sequel directly continues on this, even playing the woman who kills Joel as revenge for his assault on the hospital. Ellie in kind becomes more vengeful and evil as she tries to find Joel's killers. The game switches between both viewpoints, and both characters slaughter each others' friends and found family in their quest for revenge. One such example is Ellie killing a dog, who turns out to have been Abby's dog... and Abby being the one who personally beat Joel to death.
• In BioShock, the Story Arc with the NPC "Atlas" adapts this to game play itself. From the game characters' point of view if not yours, you go around killing children just because some NPC contact asked you to. Where is your sense of agency? If you will not exert free will, maybe it should be taken from you.
  • The entire sequence in which Andrew Ryan is killed in the first game literally defines this trope; it's revealed at the climax (no, not the Atlas fight; that's called "denouement") that the player character has been conditioned at a genetic level to respond to the specific phrase "would you kindly", and the player has been following orders that their character actually had no choice about, then yanks away control of the character ("Kill, would you kindly" ringing any bells?). Prior to that point, the player had been continually in control of their character without any cutscenes, which is what made the sudden realization of loss of control so potent.
  • BioShock 2 seemingly goes out of its way to make you feel like the biggest bastard ever if you choose the evil path. Yes, you can harvest every Little Sister in Rapture, but Eleanor's watching your every move and if you solve all your problems through slaughter the game ends with her deciding to follow in your footsteps... by starting with the entire world.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day stars an Anti-Hero squirrel, the point of whose whole quest is an attempt to collect money. (Actually, the original cause was he took a wrong-turn walking home, but it quickly turned into the money thing.) Though he occasionally acts heroic, he also kills whoever happens to get in his way, advertently or inadvertently, and much of the game is set in a comical world with bright visuals and happy jazz music that seem straight out of an old Mickey Mouse cartoon. Then at the end, Conker becomes rich by robbing a bank and is crowned king, but his girlfriend dies in the process, and he laments how greedy and foolish he was.
• Harvester revealed in the end that the whole game was a game-within-a-game to make the player character (and, by extension, the player) into a serial killer. You've been having Steve do steadily eviler acts all game (from minor vandalism to arson to murder), and the whole point is to make the "real" Steve into the kind of person that does those things for fun. However, the game is something of a subversion, as it's a mockery of the notion that video games make you violent. Choosing the bad end spells it out the best:
  "Don't you know that people who watch violence become violent themselves?"
  "THAT'S BULLSHIT, MOM."
• Metal Gear:
  • This may have been part of what Hideo Kojima was going for in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. In the beginning, Raiden, a fresh-faced US Army recruit taking after the game's previous protagonist and super-soldier Solid Snake, is given a fake identity inputted by the player and then takes on the terrorists... except it's clear Raiden is out of his depth and was not a great hero like Snake was, the terrorists are fighting agianst something worse, and what's more, it turns out Raiden and the player have been unwittingly fulfilling the commands of fascist AI who are well on their way to world domination - and you just killed one of the only rebels against it. Great work. In the end, Raiden literally throws away the player's input by hurling the dog tags containing the ID the player inputted into the sea in a cutscene, and throughout the rest of the series, becomes determined to be his own soldier fighting for what's right, regardless of who might try to control him. Subtle!
  • The tranquilizer gun probably became the favorite weapon for many people after the fight with The Sorrow, whose boss battle sends the ghosts of people you've slain. There's just something about passing by each and every soldier you killed as they scream in horror that gets to you.
  • Liquid accuses Snake of 'enjoying all the killing' at the end of Metal Gear Solid. The game gives you opportunities to, among other things, strangle and break the neck of a guard while peeing in a urinal. It's your own fault if it rings true. (This is then called back to in MGS4. If you kill fifty mooks in one area, a soundbite of Liquid saying "You enjoy all the killing" will play, and Snake will vomit in self-disgust, taking a hit to his Psyche meter (which affects stamina and aiming). It happens with every fiftieth mook dispatched thereafter, too.)
  • More subtle example from the sequel — there's a pretty young hostage named Jennifer in the Shell 1 core, who you can address by name, guess the measurements of, or knock her out to look up her skirt (you get special Codecs if you call Mission Control while looking up there or after having taken a photograph of it). When the Ninja descends in the following cut scene, one of the bullets she deflects hits the female hostage in the head, killing her. It's your fault if her last memory is of you molesting her.
• At the end of Contact, the main character inflicts this on the player, getting sick of the player controlling him and fighting back by attacking the screen.
• The Witcher, thanks to having the consequences of your choices come back an hour later to bite you in the ass, ends up doing this in a sort of way. For instance, you end up as a sort of surrogate father for an orphan, and he occasionally asks you questions regarding your own moral compass and various views on destiny and the world in general. He later turns out to be the Big Bad, thanks to some accidental time travel, and he spits back your own philosophy as a justification for genocide and the creation of twisted mutants.
  • However, Geralt makes it very clear that Jacques De Aldersberg never truly understood the lessons he learned from Geralt (assuming Jacques de Aldersberg is indeed Alvin as an adult). Best demonstrated in the following exchange:
    Jacques De Aldersberg: You always believed man makes his own destiny. I seek to change all humanity's fate.
    Geralt: You robbed humanity of its right to decide. You understand nothing.
  • Done well earlier on too. If you give equipment to the terrorists, which they insist they need for the medical supplies included, they will later use weapons also included to kill one of your friends. Definitely a Player Punch.
• Done with subtlety and elegance in Shadow of the Colossus: arguably the whole idea behind the game's minimalistic structure and almost complete lack of dialogue is to silently stress the fact that you are slaying mostly docile creatures that are unique, majestic and beautiful. You Bastard indeed.
  • During the credits you get shown the remains of every single colossus, which have returned to earth and rocks, still lying in the same position as they collapsed.
• Fallout 3 pulls one of these, very nearly breaking the fourth wall to do so: If you choose to put a dying man named Timebomb out of his misery, a message pops up to tell you that you're a bastard for killing him and you lose Karma.
  • Justified in that it's incredibly easy to save him, and murdering him means losing one of the best items in the game for no reward.
  • Fallout: New Vegas pulls one too when, after killing Mr. House you receive a message chastising you for your action. At first it looks like the game itself is berating you, but scrolling down reveals the victim wrote his own obituary.
  • Lonesome Road, the final story add-on for Fallout: New Vegas, manages to give the player one from all the way back in Fallout 3 and its add-on, Broken Steel. Throughout Lonesome Road, you hear logs from a Dr. Whitly, a kindly Enclave scientist. It turns out he was at Adams Air Force Base, which the Lone Wanderer canonically seems to have destroyed.
    • Lonesome Road could be described as an extended case of this trope. Ulysses constantly lambasts the Player Character for causing immense damage in the world through careless actions...something that not only happened in the Backstory of the DLC, but throughout the entire series! He even goes so far as to accuse you of "carrying death wherever you go." He's...not entirely wrong about that.
• Dark Souls:
  • The Boss Battle with Sif in is going to make you feel like a rat unless you're a dog-hater (and maybe even then). Not only does he look like a Big Friendly Dog (well, technically a wolf, and much, much, bigger, but same idea), you have to kill him multiple times. But it gets worse the third time when you find out he not only looks like a Big Friendly Dog, you find out he is one. He's trying to honor the legacy of his dead master and trying to prevent you from making the same mistake he did. He doesn't even want to fight you, you rat. To make this even worse, as he loses health, he's clearly injured, limping and stumbling more until he collapses. You rat.
  • There's Lord's Blade Ciaran, whom you encounter after killing Artorias. She's seen mourning at his grave and will ask you to hand over his soul so she can pay proper respects. You can refuse to hand over the soul, and Ciaran will only sadly reply that she shouldn't have been presumptuous. To add insult to injury, you can attack and kill her for no reason. All so you can loot her weapons and equipment off her corpse (which by the way, she does give to you if you trade in the soul in the first place^note although to be absolutely fair, she only gives you her weapons- the only way to get her unique armour is to kill her)! Poor girl was only trying to honor the memory of the man she loved. Oh, and did we mention that if you kill her, her last words are, "My dear Artorias"?
  • The Fair Lady, Quelaag's Sister. You need the Old Witch's Ring to understand her, and if you can you'll wish you couldn't. The poor girl's only comfort in her unending torment (a consequence of her own selfless kindness) is her dear, beloved sister who looks out for her- even her devoted acolytes, the Egg-Burdened, can't do much to comfort her as they don't even speak her language. Unfortunately, if you're actually able to reach the Fair Lady, Quelaag is already dead. Because you killed her. But not only is she unaware that Quelaag is dead, she mistakes you for her.
    The Fair Lady: Quelaag? Please, sister, do not cry. I am happy, truly. I have you, don't I?
  • Later in the series, at the end of the Ringed City DLC for Dark Souls III, the only way to progress to the DLC's Final Boss is to take steps that destroy the city. As you explore the wasteland left afterwards, Shira - one of the few people in the city to not attempt to murder you on sight - will show up and start hurling lightning arrows at you to punish you for your treachery.
• In Demon's Souls, there's Maiden Astraea and her knight/lover Garl Vinland's boss fight. Astraea and Garl only use Demon power because they genuinely want to help the creatures living in the valley you encounter them in and ease their pain, and neither want to fight you and ask you to leave quietly... It just so happens that you need to kill them in order to stop the Big Bad. The only reason they fight you at all is in self-defense, because you essentially intruded on and threatened them. They constantly tell you to leave them alone during the entire boss fight, too. Even worse, should you kill either Garl or Astraea first, the other will commit suicide out of grief. In short, you basically assaulted a woman who did absolutely nothing to you, murdered her bodyguard/boyfriend in front of her, watched her kill herself and then just casually walked away. Hope you're proud of yourself, Slayer of Demons.
  • From the same game, there's the ending where you betray and murder the Maiden in Black and join forces with the Old One. Not only did you just double-cross the one person who was unconditionally kind and loyal to you, but the cutscene that plays shows you stepping on her corpse's head, too. You Bastard indeed...
• World of Warcraft, so many...
  • A very subtle one: In Hillsbrad, you come across a group of humans who are buried neck-deep by the Forsaken and are at the mercy of the surrounding ghouls. Your character spots a shovel nearby and decides to "do the right thing". The quest that follows gives you the option to dig the humans out or bash their brains in with the shovel. Should you choose to do the latter, you get a debuff that tells you to "rethink your definition of "right"".
  • Hunter player characters are often avid collectors, and will search the game world for "rare spawn" beasts that appear periodically. As such, if you kill such a beast in a Cataclysm zone, your reward is the Crystalline Tear of Loyalty, which is described as "The desire to serve as a loyal companion, coalesced into a single priceless crystal". It doesn't do anything, but you can sell it for 25 gold. You bastard.
  • If you do a Human or Orc orphan's quests for Children's Week, you can choose from one of a few rewards, including pets and pet biscuits that make your pets larger. You can also choose an item that can be sold for a few gold, and is said to be for those who like telling children Greatfather Winter does not exist.
  • Every time you boot one of the NPCs off of the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth or its yak equivalent from Mists of Pandaria (or even when you dismount) you get to hear them complain.
    Hakmud of Argus: I thought we were friend, buddy! How could you leave Hakmud stranded?
  • Players who get the inn/tavern in their garrison will get various NPCs visiting and offering quests. One of them is Moroes, a boss from the Karazhan raid. His quest involves finding something to help clean up the mess the player and their raid buddies left the last time they were there.
  • One quest in Booty Bay requires you to kill Bossy, a defenseless cow. What makes it worse is that you have to tell the poor cow what you intend to do, which causes her to bow her head in submission. No matter how much genocide you've caused in this game, no matter how many times you've eaten hamburger in reality, this is going to make you feel like a rat for days.
  • The Gleamhoof Fawn pet in Val'sharah is always found near stags and does. Its pet journal description:
    Now, where are its parents? You monster.
  • One of the harshest reminders that War Is Hell comes during a quest in Dragonblight where the quest giver tells you to kill an officer and use her device to gain information on Ley Lines. If her cry of "Sorry Daddy," right before you kill her doesn't make you feel like a monster, this letter on her corpse certainly will. While her father does not blame you, the letter from him saying that can be cold comfort indeed. While this is only for Alliance characters, the Horde equivalent is no better.
  • It pulls one of these with the death knight starting chain in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Working for the Scourge involves many screaming civilians getting slaughtered by you and your compatriots. Then, you reach the race specific execution quest...
  • Perhaps done even earlier in The Burning Crusade expansion: one mission requires you to sneak into an enemy camp to investigate certain people. During which you can talk to most of the neutral-via-your-disguise enemy NPCs and hear them talk about going into a nearby town and having drinks or starting a 'leatherball' game. Upon completing this quest, the quest giver orders for you to go back into the camp and kill X number of the enemy characters. Yes, they ARE an evil cult... but still...
  • In Stormheim, the player can attend a jarl's wake and provoke the other attendees to kill them. One female Vrykul drops two poppy flowers, given by her twin daughters when they wished her a safe journey.
  • At the various Warden Towers in the Broken Shore there are guards from the other faction who are killed more as a statement to the enemy than for any actual gain. Rogues who pickpocket these guards may come away with a family engraving, wishing the bearer returns home safely.
  • Death knights get another such moment in 9.2: the quest chain to unlock their class-specific undead dragon mount involves going to the Ruby Sanctum and slaughtering red dragons. You don't have to kill them all, but if you do, the then-current Lich King chimes in with "You are empty inside, just like me." and regardless of how many you killed, there are red dragon NPCs in later expansions who remember your transgression and are more than willing to remind you of it.
• Deus Ex starts you off as a government agent going after terrorists. It looks like a classic FPS at first, but going on a killing spree on your first mission will earn you the disapproval of several characters. Not only that, but you later find out that you're working for the Bad Guys and join up with the "terrorists" you may have been killing off previously.
  • One part of the game has you talk to the parents of a MJ12 trooper. The father has resigned himself that his son is no longer a boy, will give you his son's user name and password for a console, and is accepting that he may be killed by the player (somewhat, he'll curtly say to the player, "I have helped you kill my son, isn't that enough?" if you attempt to talk to him again) The mother on the other hand, will beg you to spare him, and berate her husband for "letting politics get in front of his duties as a father." Continue to kill MJ12 troopers if you like, but you can't help but wonder if you just killed the couple's son.
  • It's easy to get an NPC innkeeper killed in the second missions and not even realize it; then you meet his grieving daughter being forced to prostitute herself a few missions later. Hope you saved.
    • Inadvertently evil, JC can kill the innkeeper himself, in front of his daughter, and respond to her mourning with the now-memetic phrase, (and, in this context, sarcastic) "What a shame."
  • At least, unlike a lot of these examples, Deus Ex does give you the option of not killing everyone, even if it makes the game much harder.
  • In The Nameless Mod, playing the World Corp storyline will give you this trope a lot from the PDX gang, who were your friends before the events of the game.
  • In a lesser-known dialogue: Although the group "The Rooks" is responsible for the oppression of other, more peaceful citizens, if JC slaughters them all, confronts their leader, and orders him to give him what he wants (a bomb), if the main character's inventory is full, JC will let out an uncharacteristic, sinister-sounding laugh.
  • And then there's Deus Ex: Human Revolution where the Achievement for accepting O'Malley's bribe and letting the dirty cop skip town flat-out calls you a "greedy bastard".
• This was the premise of Crusader of Centy: the main character comes of age and sets out on a quest to kill monsters in true adventure game style. But over a series of bizarre circumstances, it is revealed that the monsters are intelligent and (initially) innocent, and you've spent the whole game committing genocide because you assumed they deserved to die.
• The Mind Screw last act of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time reveals that the entire world was created as a giant virtual reality MMO for a more advanced dimension's amusement. This was depicted as plainly sick and disturbing leading the heroes to Rage Against the Heavens when they'd become obsolete. Then there's that line about no controlling with a joy-stick.
• Grand Theft Auto (a game series that's downright deliciously wanton), particularly Grand Theft Auto IV, is prone to this though in-game content that's easy to miss in a regular play through (such as in radio messages or TV shows).
  • Speaking of GTA IV, Niko Bellic is an incredibly self-aware avatar. He mourns his loneliness when he sleeps with prostitutes, apologizes if he almost runs over a pedestrian, and then spends much of the cutscenes talking about the horrible things he is responsible for and his regret. And then there's the climax: Roman already holds you responsible for destroying his comfortable life and demands you choose money over revenge. If you choose Money, he dies in a drive-by meant for you. If you ignore him and choose Revenge, he lives but your friend, and possible love interest, Kate Mccreary dies in his place. Either way, after you kill the Big Bad, you receive a phone call asking if it was all worth it. Niko seems unconvinced, hangs up, and the post-game plays out with Niko exactly where he was before even making the decision — minus one relationship.
  • Still becomes quite unavoidable when you play the game's first episode. In the main game, Niko kills a nameless biker on the subway line as part of a contract. In The Lost And Damned, Johnny Klebitz and his friend Jim Fitzgerald decide to split up to evade a hit put out on them by The Mafia. Jim decides to try and lose the heat on the subway...
  • Grand Theft Auto V provides a nominal, subtle use of the trope, in conjunction with Leaning on the Fourth Wall: there's a billboard right outside the Bolingbroke Penitentiary (Senora Freeway, going through the northern desert) that reads "HELL AWAITS (in huge, red block letters) if you're having fun."
• Saints Row 2 carries out this trope to the letter in a secret mission: When you find out that Julius Little was the one who attempted to kill you at the end of the first game, you go hunting for him. At the end of the mission, you shoot him in cold blood. Before he dies, he explains that he did it because the Saints, who were originally meant to save the city from violence, had become, in essence, worse than the Vice Kings. While this is true, and certainly made the player have second thoughts about their behavior in the game, the situation was punctuated by the main character exclaiming how he didn't care, and shot him in the forehead. Worse is that if there had not been a speech like that, the player probably would have done that in the first place, adding even more punch to his words.
  • The game also does this with the newspaper articles after some of the mandatory missions, noting the massive human suffering caused by such actions as shooting down helicopters over populated areas, carrying on running gun battles on busy freeways, and burning down an entire housing project to get at the drug labs in some of the apartments. Bystanders on the street will also make comments about some particularly cruel things the protagonist does to individual members of the rival gangs, like arranging for Jessica to be locked in a car trunk and crushed to death, crippling the lead guitarist of the Feed Dogs, and burying Shogo Akuji alive.
  • Downplayed with one of the endings in Saints Row: The Third. The final ending fork basically boils down to saving two of your trusted allies (and Burt Reynolds) but letting Killbane escape, or sacrificing said allies (and Burt Reynolds) to hunt down and kill Killbane. The former comes with a more upbeat sequence (complete with "Holding Out For A Hero" playing in the background,) while the latter is more brutal and joyless, with Killbane delivering a Hannibal Lecture to the Boss before he's killed, and Pierce asking them if it was worth it, to which they can't respond.
• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening lets you steal from a particular shop. If you do so, the game permanently renames you to "THIEF" and asks you, "Are you proud of yourself?" Come back into the store and the shopkeeper kills you.
  I wasn't kidding when I said pay! Now, you'll pay the ultimate price!
• Dhaos of Tales of Phantasia attempts to pull your heartstrings with the reveal that he's only fighting to save his planet, which loses momentum when you consider that a few minutes earlier he told the player that he didn't care one whit about what happened to Earth.
  • Dhaos is kind of an interesting case. In the actual game, he's a colossal jerk that decided that humanity was going to kill the tree with their prototype manatechnology, and thus attacked, killing everyone who had any connection at all to it. This naturally freaked out humanity, forcing them to speed up production and fire a Mana Cannon based on the prototype technology in order to even have a chance of winning the war Dhaos starts. This kills the World Tree. This makes Dhaos even more angry. That's not all that happened, but the main thing is that in the game, the blame for all of the events is distributed among several parties equally.
  • Meanwhile, in the OVA, Dhaos is made to be more of a Noble Demon. Unfortunately, this had the effect of making the humans of the past war crazy morons. See, while the Mana Cannon was built in-game to stop Dhaos, this time around humanity decided to just build one for no real reason. Dhaos hears about this, and goes on to stop the construction to save the World Tree.
• Tales of Xillia 2 does this for the player with the Bad Ending. In it, Ludger has decided that he cannot kill his brother to get to the Land of Canaan and the party decides that, since they must get into Canaan, they'll go behind his back and kill Julius themselves. This causes Ludger to snap and fight the entire party, who all beg Ludger to come to his senses during the battle, and he kills them all. Even Julius is surprised at this course of action. And because Ludger is a Heroic Mime and dialogue options are decided by the player? You decided to kill the cast of Xillia. You and no-one else.
• In Iji, a game about a civilian forced to become a supersoldier to fight off an alien invasion, if you play the game like any other shoot-em-up, which is what seems to be expected of you, your enemies at various points call you out for the vast amounts of deaths you've caused (not that this isn't hypocritical on their part, as you get mocked by a genocidal maniac and a egotistical assassin). It is possible to play through without killing anyone, in which case you gain a certain amount of admiration instead.
• In ICO, you find the body of Yorda frozen as stone with shadow creatures standing around her that run as you approach. The shadow creatures do not attack you; some approach you curiously, others run, while still others fly or run around in circles as if they're confused. To proceed you have to kill them, and as you kill them you realize that they are the souls/spirits/essence/etc of the other horned boys, innocent victims who were sacrificed like you were intended to be.
• Call of Duty: World at War does this. At two points in the game, in the Russian missions, you have the option to spare or execute a group of helpless German soldiers. Also, one of your squadmates keeps a diary. Before the last mission, Sgt. Reznov will read an entry from said diary. If you spared the soldiers both times, your character is described as a true hero. If you killed both groups, you're called a brutal, merciless savage and if you killed one and spared the other he puts you as morally ambiguous individual.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 does this as well when you not only play on the side of Makarov, the new Ultranationalist leader, you get to also gun down an airport full of civilians and shoot them as they pitifully try to crawl away to safety. And to top it all off, you get shot by Makarov himself because you were a CIA agent working on the inside. So not only were you doing horrible things, but you were also on the side of good the entire time. Wow Infinity Ward, wow. You'll also get shot if you don't do anything as well
  • And Makarov uses the incident as an excuse to declare war on the United States.
  • Not only that, but the same scenario ( you being shot and killed by Makarov) plays out whether you fire your weapon or not. And the mission tells you to follow Makarov, not kill the civilians. If you killed a single person, it was your choice to do so.
• A Marathon Infinity level-design finalist plays this for laughs. Upon starting, there is nothing you can do but press a button. You do, a bunch of screams let out, and the window next to you fills with lava. You can then go over to a terminal where a stereotypical middle-management type person congratulates you for putting down that miners' strike so quickly.
• In Portal: "You euthanized your faithful companion cube more quickly than any test subject on record. Congratulations."
  • "There was even going to be a party for you. A big party, that all of your friends were invited to. I invited your best friend, the Companion Cube. Of course, he couldn't come because you murdered him."
  • GLaDOS implies it with the subtly angry line "You're not a good person. You know that, right? Good people don't end up here."
  • The song at the end of Portal, Still Alive. 'I'm not even angry. I'm being so sincere right now. Even though you broke my heart. And killed me. And tore me to pieces. And threw every piece into a fire. As they burned it hurt because / I was so happy for you!' That she sings all of this in a cheerful voice makes the whole thing a You Bastard moment. She also calls you a monster a few times in the sequel. She really does know how to make you feel guilty for stopping her trying to experiment on you to death.
  • Also this quote from the sequel's trailer: "But I'm sure we can put our differences behind us. For Science!. You Monster!."
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, a soldier says in a base conversation that some of the soldiers are not looking forward to the end of the war, because it means the end of their soldiering career, with all its promotion possibilities and great pay. To this Ike says that the men should be ashamed of finding pleasure in the war and should instead concentrate on the great sorrow the war has caused for all sides. That can really hit home at players who don't want the game to end because they want to level their soldiers higher and get everyone to 20/20.
  • Chapter 10 in Fire Emblem: Awakening has Chrom and company fight against General Mustafa and his men, with the victory condition being to kill Mustafa. The average player would instinctively kill as many of his troops as possible first before facing off against him. Then they read his dying words:
    Mustafa: Please... spare my men...
• Jesse Venbrux's ultra-short (seriously, it takes a few seconds to play) Execution combines this with a Deconstruction of how death normally works in video games: Shooting the prisoner leads to a "You lose" message. Restarting the game leads you to a message that it's already too late, followed by a view of the prisoner's corpse. This is accomplished by adding a bit of data to your computer's registry, so simply deleting the game and re-downloading it will still give you the corpse. On the other hand, attempting to quit without shooting the prisoner leads to a "You win" message.
• Knights of the Old Republic II did this to the classic RPG mechanic of killing things for XP, by revealing that you're growing more powerful not because you're learning things, but because you're in a way draining your opponents' lives as you kill them. A lesson made even more jarring given it's effectively hand-waved by your party members and by the final outcomes in that if you're good you lead to the resurrection of the Jedi Order and if you're bad your actions significantly weaken the already fractured Republic potentially leading to it's destruction. Values dissonance?
• Chrono Cross throws this at you after you kill the Hydra - not only is it revealed that it was the last of its kind, but it was pregnant.
• In EarthBound (1994), when Ness reaches Magicant, he can recruit one of the five Flying Men to accompany him through the rest of the dungeon. If one dies, he can go back to their house to recruit another, but the remaining Flying Men get increasingly angrier at you for letting them die, and the graves of the deceased Flying Men have decreasingly detailed inscription until finally, all the Flying Man are dead and the last grave is unmarked.
• Devil Survivor makes it clear that choosing Yuzu's path — aka The Escape ending — is the worst decision to make and practically every mandatory battle for that ending involves fellow humans, and even Loki, to call everyone out for it.
• Devil Survivor 2 has a mechanic in the Septentrione Arc, where the player gains Death Videos of certain party members and can save them from their fated demise. Letting party members die makes everyone feel bad, but nowhere is the game as blunt and obvious with its intended guilt-flinging as with the death of Io Nitta. If Io ends up dying from acting as Lugh's medium, her death is depicted worse than the original Death Video showed. And after that scene, there is a mandatory event to watch called Io's Death, where the entire party is lamenting how nobody managed to get to know Io well enough to have her open up to them.
• In Mass Effect, some characters react strongly if the player chooses a more morally ambiguous option, or just one that character disagrees with. Mass Effect 3 has its fair share, but probably the worst case is if Wrex is still alive and you faked the genophage cure, leading to a confrontation on the Citadel. Wrex will even go as far as to call Shepard a hypocrite, and the encounter inevitably ends with his death. If you killed the Virmire survivor during the Citadel invasion (itself rather easy to avoid), Wrex will call you out on that too. If the bomb on Tuchanka detonated killing many krogan (including Eve) Wrex will also call you on letting that happen All in all, it's a real low point.
• Dragon Age: Origins has plenty of this, too.
  • After killing a wounded soldier, Alistair asks: "Does the word 'insane' mean anything to you?" The Warden can respond "I prefer the term 'ruthless'."
  • You can also overhear two characters by Lake Calenhad having a very fourth-wall-breaking conversation about how they might just be "characters in a play" and how their world might be all a game for somebody else's enjoyment. They follow up by wondering what kind of sick freak would enjoy seeing them suffer so much, and one of them wonders why on Thedas these "superior beings" would enjoy giving him such painful warts.
• The Talkative Man in Dragon Age II has similar complaints.
• EVE Online's chronicles and the Burning Life novel go a long way to fleshing out how the world of New Eden views capsuleers like you. In the course of being your average MMORPG character, you are an immortal directed by a moral compass completely alien to the average denizens of the world you inhabit. Thousands die at your bidding for loot or sometimes for fun, and your kind wage endless wars that up that amount by orders of magnitude. Many capsuleers are so far removed from the sphere of the ordinary person's world that they don't even realise they're carrying a crew aboard most of the ships they control. Good luck not feeling guilty on those rare occasions when those poor saps are given a voice.
• Mildly occurs in World in Conflict, towards the end. Having been under Soviet rule for months, Seattle has many Soviet propaganda posters and images painted around the city, most of them giving idealistic messages about the ending of the Cold War, a new, united world and attacking US and NATO forces for being warmongers. Now listen to the Colonel Sawyer himself admitting that the US airstrikes did more damage to the city than the Soviets themselves, consider that you are trying to save the city from a nuke by the US government and the final US assault on the city levels the whole place. A small pang of guilt is unavoidable even knowing that the Soviets are the aggressors.
  • Also occurs in the expansion where you learn Malashenko's wife and child was killed during a NATO assault in Soviet territory. Didn't you blow up some apartment buildings during the assault in Murmansk in the original game with no comments whatsoever on the implications? Or didn't Bannon shell a group of surrendering Soviet civilians in the same mission?
• The point, done with beautiful subtlety, of Far Cry 2. Enemies attack you on sight. Patrols try to kill you before even checking to see if you're an enemy or a friend. The entire world is hostile. The result? The player learns to attack first. To kill everything in sight. To blow up jeeps the moment they see a patrol. In short: To become exactly the same as all the people you're murdering. Reinforced by a reputation system that sees (at high levels) enemies scream and run when they see you and the Underground, the only decent group of people in the game, to refuse to do business with you.
  • Some of the more compassionate behaviours exhibited by enemies had a similar effect. Shooting a guy who is shooting at you? No problem. After all, that's just self defence, at least to some degree. But shooting a guy who is trying to drag his wounded mate to safety? Not fun. The effect is magnified when you can hear him constantly reassuring the wounded fellow that everything will be all right.
• In the game Evil Genius, you perform one of these in a game that otherwise tries to allow you to revel in being a Diabolical Mastermind. Each global anti-Evil-Genius group has a Super Agent, a practically-unkillable Super Agent that can only be disposed of in a certain way. Mariana Mamba? You strap her down in a surgery booth and make her morbidly obese. Not that bad, she can recover. Jet Chan? You challenge him to a karate duel, win, and he flees to contemplate his loss. That's okay, he's not injured except for his pride. Dirk Masters? You dunk him in a biological tank filled with chemicals obtained from his own steroid-riddled gym rag. Kinda fitting and justified. John Steele? You strap him to a rocket and send him flying into space. At least he goes down swinging, befitting a hero. But defeating Katarina Frostonova, the emotionally-dead assassin who lived in a Soviet-run Orphanage of Fear after the KGB accidentally killed her parents? You find the only thing she ever cared about as a child - a big teddy bear - and cut it to pieces in front of her.
  • It becomes even worse in its sequel, where the best way to get the Super Agents out of the way is to kill them. And the worst part is that most Face Death with Despair. Agent X? He's so utterly tired that he begs you to just finish him off. The Blue Saint? He apologizes for failing to help you as he is executed. Symmetry? She pitifully pleads for mercy before being left to die. Wreckling Bola? She asks about whether her dogs are safe, knowing full well that she'll most likely not be mourned. Atomic Olga? She quietly acknowledges that there's always a chance that war can be lost. Almost makes you feel sorry for all of them.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert, in the first mission under the Soviet campaign, your goal is to kill everyone in a village. You have three planes and some soldiers. Alright, everything's fine, just killing some low-graphics sprites for the level. Then the level ends, and you're treated to a (for its time) high graphics CG cutscene of the same planes that you commanded gunning down a family, you see a little girl drop her stuffed bunny, and the camera zooms in on it. Nice job finishing the first mission, You Bastard. The next video you see? Your immediate superior congratulating you on a job well done.
• If you use the Liquid Tiberium Bomb in the last GDI mission of Tiberium Wars (despite being warned that using it will set off a chain reaction) you end up killing your entire army and twenty five million civilians AND set a precedent for GDI using Tiberium weaponry in the future. General Granger immediately resigns in disgust but not before calling the player a war criminal while looking directly at the camera. Also a rare example of this trope implied to be canon by the sequel, which makes it hit even harder.
• In FMV-driven adventure game Quantum Gate and its sequel Vortex, the 'bugs' you wind up shooting in the 'tween-act minigame were actually fairy people, and the barren planet is actually a lush paradise.
• In Heavenly Sword they get into to this right off the bat as the extremely realistic looking main character turns to the screen and yells at you for letting her die when the fate of her people hung in the balance and she was the only one who could save them.
• Independence Port in City of Heroes is one of the largest zones in the game, over two miles from end to end, but with most important spots within a few hundred yards of the tram line. Therefore, it's rare for anyone to wander outside that radius unless a mission specifically directs them to go further. A newer exploration badge in the far corner of the map reflects that tendency... by pointing out that the area sees a lot of mob-related deaths because no heroes patrol that far.
• Final Fantasy VI Advance has the Optional Boss Kaiser Dragon condemn the heroes for slaughtering its fellow dragons simply for the sake of fighting in its introduction speech.
• Final Fantasy X has one, when it comes to Rikku and lightning. The player always has the option to attack their own party and, if Rikku is hit with a lightning spell, she gives off a shriek. What a cute shriek that is, isn't it? Well, during a scene in the Thunder Plains, Rikku reveals that she is terrified of lightning, because her brother accidentally hit her with a lightning spell when she was a kid. You can still let her get hit with lightning, but do you still think that shriek is adorable?
• Breath of Fire III's first boss qualifies. It is a giant monkey-like creature called a Nue that has been terrorizing the town and stealing their cattle, so you and your little adopted family go to take it out - only to find out that the only reason it was stealing food was to give it to its deceased offspring, whom it didn't understand were dead. Rei, Teepo and Ryu are quite shaken by this.
  • There's more to that. Right after reporting the deed to Bunyan, a hermit lumberjack who strong-armed them into this^note As both punishment and a shot at redemption, actually: the protagonist and party were stealing from his food supply, during a dry spell in the whole region., he questions the heroes if they could indeed ignore the fact that a marauding, savage beast had a litter that would soon spread the damages to more serious numbers. It's more of a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation.
• The protagonist of Manhunt is forced to kill by a mysterious and malevolent figure, who's watching it all on a TV screen for a sadistic thrill. The more gruesome murders you commit, the more obvious the parallel is between the villain and the player.
• NieR gets a lot of comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus, and for good reason. By the end of the game, you'll have the unpleasant suspicion that your desperate, well-meaning main character may have crossed a few lines. By the end of your New Game+, you'll learn that he's done much, much worse.
• [PROTOTYPE] has this in spades. You can tap into enemy communications - and hear their cries of agony as you, or the infected, go on murderous rampages. Helicopter pilots in particular give out hellish, despairing screams as they plummet towards the ground.
• No More Heroes: Travis actually calls out the player for enjoying watching him and his fellow assassins fight to the death towards the end of the second game. Well, technically he calls out Sylvia and the UAA, but the way he does it certainly causes the player to pause and say, "Wait, is he talking to me?"
• Land of War - The Beginning combines this with And This Is for... after you killed the German sniper who sniped your friend, Tadek. "And this is for Tadek, you bastard!"
• The Hell Lord Arc of Legend of Mana. It's made abundantly clear that Draconis is evil, and though he blackmails you into doing his bidding saying no to him has no permanent effect on the plot or gameplay, so going along with his quest to kill the other dragons and steal their Mana Crystals means you get What the Hell, Hero? thrown at you quite a bit.
• The cliffhanger ending of the second Simon the Sorcerer game has Simon criticize the player for enjoying the situation he's ended up in (stuck in Sordid's body and at the receiving end of much humiliation by the citizens while Sordid romps around in his body in the real world), and throws in a bit of Paranoia Fuel to drive the point home.
• The ending of Arc Rise Fantasia. You aren't called one, but boy do you feel like a bastard after hearing Eesa's backstory and why she had to fight you. The fact that she gracefully offers to let her body be used in your plan after losing just makes it even sadder.
• In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, you make affable treasure hunter Nathan Drake run around snapping necks, crushing tracheas, throwing men off moving trains, and shooting veritable armies of mooks that come at you in seemingly endless waves. So when Lazarevic says, at the climax, "How many men did you kill? How many, just today?", it's probably supposed to be a boilerplate "we're not so different" speech... but it's hard not to admit he has a point.
• In Rift, killing harmless animals will give the player the "critter killer" status for one minute; mousing over the effect's icon will display the message "you should be ashamed."
• Hilariously parodied in E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy. Behold.◊
• In Alpha Protocol, there are very few enemies you have to kill. A bit of mercy can not only drastically change several points in the plot but provide you with perks, stat bonuses, and recognition from your peers (both allies and opposition). For instance, sparing the head of a terrorist organization gives you an ally and a bit of a political upper hand.
  • When you use lethal force, you get a count of the number of orphans created. Interestingly this changes depending on who you kill. When in Saudi Arabia against members of a terrorist group, there are several orphans for each death. When going up against members of the Chinese secret police in Taipei, there is a single orpahn per death.
• In DC Universe Online if you're playing a villain you'll find yourself dishing out punishment (and based on your weapon selection possibly shooting) to everything from iconic superheroes to run of the mill cops, to university students. It all sort of blends together pretty quickly, right up until the point were you reach one of the late game missions where you end up attacking firefighters. Ouch.
• Mortal Kombat has this in the first and second installments. So you beat the game and saved the world, right? Wrong. You just condemned the Earth to destruction. "Have a nice day" indeed.
• The Elder Scrolls games typically have a menu listing how many of certain accomplishments the player has done (for example, "people killed", "quests completed", "locations discovered".) Skyrim lists how many rabbits the player has killed in this menu - under the heading "bunnies slaughtered".
• Inverted in Panzer Dragoon Saga. At the end of the game, you find out that the being that resurrected you at the very beginning of the game was the Dragon itself. The protagonist Edge then asks if the dragon is not the "divine one" the game world's religious prophecy spoke of, then who is? The dragon then makes the revelation that the divine one is the being that has been guiding Edge throughout the game and then talks directly to the player, calling them by their real name they entered at the beginning (This is the only time that your entered name is referenced in game, and the one reason why the game urges you to enter your real name). The dragon asks you to "press the button" and end their world's struggle (it's implied he wants you to turn the game off). Since we don't want to do that, the game then continues and the dragon takes Edge away through a portal. Right before Edge goes through it the camera does a close-up and he looks directly at the player, saying "It was you all along. Thank You" as though in prayer. In short, rather than instigating pain, death and suffering, the player is the god of the world's religion, the divine watcher that guides the protagonist through difficulty, provides him with the resolve to continue and delivers him from evil.
• In the "Kobold Chaos" challenge in Dungeons & Dragons Online, there is a lantern archon that randomly spawns and drops dragonshards in its wake. If you kill it (and it doesn't fight back) you'll get even more dragonshards, an increased score...and a scolding from the dungeon master.
• Spec Ops: The Line is made of this trope. The player character walks into a sandstorm-wracked Dubai with every appearance and intention of playing out the heroic story of most military-themed shooters: saving civilians and shooting the bad guys before rescuing the Big Good, a courageous general who defied his superiors for the greater good. That certainty lasts right up until he finds himself firing on American soldiers in self-defense, and the preconception shatters and falls through his (and the players') fingers like sand. Innocents die, atrocities are witnessed (and committed), and the protagonist and his team come closer and closer to breaking compounded by the accidental use of white phosphorous mortars on a civilian camp. The game goes from fairly standard loading tips to openly mocking and asking the player if they still believe they can call themselves a good person, if they're getting entertained by this nightmarish situation, if everything they've done will be justified in the end, that this is all their fault, and that, in no certain terms, the player is a nasty, brutish sadist. It's finally revealed that the rogue commander died months ago, and the protagonist has built himself a hallucinatory bad guy on which to blame all wrongdoing. So in a sense, he created fiction that made him feel like a hero no matter what horrors he perpetrated. Say, that sounds familiar.
  • Of particular note is that, by the end of the game, the Loading Screen tips have morphed to be damning of what you've done as Walker, and then there's this line at the climax which, as Extra Credits put it, may as well have been delivered directly to the screen.
    Konrad: It takes a strong man to deny what's right in front of him. And if the truth is undeniable, you create your own. The truth, Walker, is that you're here because you wanted to feel like something you're not: A hero.
• Parodied in web games You Were Hallucinating the Whole Time and Video Game Morality Play, which were created largely as responses to Spec Ops: The Line, deconstructing the trope to hell and back while openly mocking said game. Both of them railroad the player into doing bad things (eg. shooting civilians, or playing a spaceship shooter where you were actually hallucinating and shooting orphaned children) and then chastise the player for it, subtly suggesting that the designers think this kind of false moral quandary is lazy and patronizing.
  YOU ARE A MONSTROUS HUMAN BEING. WHY DO YOU KEEP PLAYING... FOR ENTERTAINMENT?!?!?! YOU SICK BASTARD. YOU SHOULD THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU'VE DONE.
• Balance of Power, a geopolitical strategy game from 1985, gives the following Game Over if you let everything go to hell (and the context of the quote means they knew people would do this deliberately):
  "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure."
  • The game was smart enough to know if the player did it intentionally or not, too. The alternate message was "You have ignited an accidental nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure."
• Harvest Moon: A New Beginning:
  • Go try to sell an animal. The expression on Animal Lover Neil's face when he tells you to tell him which animal you're selling is depressing.
  • Let an animal in an Harvest Moon game die. Any animal. Don't feed it, let it stay in the rain, let it get sick, doesn't matter. The character that sells you the animal warns you that they can die, but you may be too stingy to pay for the food/medicine or too lazy to bring them in. When the animal dies and you are dragged to the local graveyard with the animal seller telling you with very clear words that this happened because of your neglect, you will feel horrible.
• Remember how in Persona 4 you would take advantage of the protagonist's way with the ladies and have up to six girlfriends at once? Well, you won't anymore as of Golden, because if you attempt to do so, come Valentine's Day, you'll have to make a choice of a single girl you want to make happy, leaving the rest of them in tears (at least among the Investigation Team girls). Ouch. Of course, the game also grinds into you if you turn down their romantic overtures, so it's really a matter of choosing when the game will yell at you.
  • The Updated Re-release adds a Worst Ending, wherein you befriend the Big Bad and help him get away with his crimes that is nothing but this from start to finish, largely because unlike the other bad endings, which can conceivably be gotten by mistake, you actually have to go out of your way to get this one.
• Persona 5 Royal takes it even further with punishing you for trying to be a Harem Seeker, if you decide to enter into two or more relationships, then on Valentine's Day, you pay for your womanizing with an inversion of Dump Them All.
• Used in the final episode of The Walking Dead depending on what choices you make. The Stranger will list various things you've done and tell you how horrible you are, such as if you save Carley over Doug (saving a pretty girl with a gun) or not letting Lilly back into the van (she was grieving, alone, etc.). Even if you did the most moral actions in the world, he'll still find faults - it's impossible to get through that game "clean".
• OFF, to a ridiculous degree. At the end of the game, the Judge calls you, the player out for helping the Batter turn the world into a barren wasteland, then kill his wife and an infant child. One of the endings then lets you play The Atoner by switching sides and taking control of the Judge to fight the Batter.
• In Rockman 4 Minus ∞, sucking up Eddie leaves Proto Man lamenting his demise in the End-Game Results Screen, then noticing something:
  I see... as I heard that his signal disappeared near you, you saw his last moment... didn't you?
• Shin Megami Tensei IV contains, in addition to the franchise's standard Law, Chaos, and Neutral endings, a fourth, "Bad" ending, involving Flynn completely giving up his quest and siding with the Omnicidal Maniac white to Mercy Kill the multiverse. The game pulls no punches in telling you this is a terrible decision, from Flynn's undyingly-loyal projected woman Burroughs practically begging him not to go through with it (in a still-undyingly-loyal way) to a complete joke of a final boss that denies you even the ability to have any fun with this ending.
  Burroughs: ...Of course. Sorry. There's no way you would be doing this if you didn't understand the consequences.
  Burroughs: Congratulations...on completing your objective.
  • These are her last words, by the way.
• In Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, a late-game critical decision determines whether you side with Dagda and help him destroy humanity in order to create a new universe free of the gods' tyranny, or go against his plans. If you choose to side with him, all of your companions fight against you while Sad Battle Music^note It's the same theme from Shin Megami Tensei IV that plays when fighting Isabeau...and Isabeau so happens to be among the former comrades you fight here plays, with every last one of them disappointed in your decision, and the battle is fairly easy just to rob you of the satisfaction of a challenging battle. Afterwards, Dagda gives you the choice of reviving one of your fallen partners to serve as your personal goddess, but it's clear that whoever you revived is no longer themselves, having been brainwashed to only take care of your needs. Later, Fujiwara and Skins rally the people of Tokyo in a final bid to stop you and Dagda, lamenting that You Could Have Used Your Powers for Good!, with the outcome being that you turn them into a mountain of corpses. Ultimately by the end of the game, you kill YHVH and create a new universe...with only you, a similarly revived-and-brainwashed Flynn, and your goddess by your side.
• In Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner, there's a mission where Earth forces are "defending" a city from exploding BAHRAM drones (but, true to form, have no regard for Martian civilian casualties whatsoever). Dingo's intention is to defend the civilians while killing the drones, and the game will rate you on the number of lives preserved at the end of the mission, but getting a good rating is quite difficult. Since Jehuty is a Super Robot it is entirely possible to raze the entire city to the ground yourself, leaving no survivors. If you do, ADA asks you sincerely in the deadpan that only an Artificial Intelligence can manage: "Are you proud of yourself?"
• Undertale:
  • When you kill enemies, you gain EXP and LV that level up your stats. By genre convention, you are led to believe that EXP stands for Experience Points and that LV stands for Character Level. Late in the game, a character reveals that it actually stands for "Execution Points" and "Level of Violence".
  • Near the end of the game, a major NPC will come to judge you and see what kind of a person you've been throughout the whole game, their reactions differing based on the aforementioned LV value. Basically, the more of a mass murderer you've been, the less nice Sans's evaluation is. But regardless of your LV when you reach them, if you killed Sans's brother Papyrus, they will ask you: if you have the power to reload your saves and start the game over, isn't it your responsibility to do what's right, especially since you can reverse your actions? In particular, if you answer no, they'll say they won't judge you for it...before calling you a dirty brother killer.
  • And if you play the game as violently as possible, the whole game will contain not only multiple straight examples of this trope, but also become one long, extended, horrifyingly detailed non-stop meta example of this trope, where the entirety of the plot and the reactions of other characters to the protagonist are designed to make you feel like you're a horrible person for playing that way. In addition to the whole situation being designed to upset your conscience, if you go far enough down this path, you will get called out on it for having the power to stop and then continuing it anyway. Extremely spoiler-tastic, but this video pretty succinctly sums up the overall tone of the game when you get deep into a Genocide run. By the way, earlier when we said you we meant the player, not the player character. Characters begins to acknowledge the player and calling them out.
  • In a Genocide run, the Final Boss role is taken from a different character than in other runs; this new Final Boss initially seems amicable but then turns into an unstoppable SNK Boss to savage the player for their sins against the game's NPCs while taking every opportunity to irritate and taunt the player.
  • Do you feel bad about completing a Genocide Run? The game will make sure you never forget it^note Unless you delete the files "system_information_962" and "system_information_963" on the PC version or simply delete your save data on the console versions.. If you decide to do any subsequent Pacifist runs, you'll get one of two new last-second scenes that act as a reminder of the Genocide run: either the player character wakes up and stares at you before letting out a modified version of the main villain's Evil Laugh, or the photo that normally shows Frisk with their friends has their friends crossed out, with the Child taking Frisk's place instead.
  • So you think you're safe from this by simply watching a Let's Play or a walkthrough on YouTube? Think again. In a Genocide Run, after remarking how horrible he and the player character are, Flowey has this to say:
    Flowey: At least we're better than those sickos who stand around and WATCH it happen.
• In Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, there's a Mon-raising subgame where you can raise Chao, small childlike creatures that can learn various behaviors. They have an average lifespan of 40 hours, after which if they were treated well in life they'll reincarnate as an egg... or if they were beaten and/or starved with no nurturing to balance it out, they'll just die. While no special sound plays when they reincarnate, when they die a somber five-note jingle plays to let you know what you've done.
• Pony Island: The game will call you out if you killed Jesus during the Colored section.....and if you didn't kill him. Considering that the Game Within a Game is literally designed by Satan, the player probably won't feel much guilt about this.
• Inverted in The Final Fantasy Legend. The Final Boss turns out to be God/Creator, who created the demon Ashura to wreak havoc on the world just for the sake of an interesting story. He even kept a record of all the adventurers who tried and failed to ascend the tower as a perverse "High Score" table. The adventuring party is understandably pissed and kills him to free the world of his control. This is one of the rare examples of the bastardry being pinned on the creator of the game rather than the player.
• A minor example shows up in the Flash game Fishy, in which you play as a fish in a pond who must eat smaller fish in order to grow larger, while avoiding bigger fish that can eat you. Eventually, you will grow to become the largest fish in the pond, capable of eating everything else — and you don't stop growing from there. Once your fish is big enough that it stretches from one side of the screen to the other, you get the message that "you ate everything and completely destroyed the pond eco-system", all while what's left of the pond is littered with the scattered bones of all the fish you ate.
• One of the achievements in Slime Rancher requires you to throw a chickadoo into an incinerator. The achievement is known as "You...Monster" and the description is "Send an adorable chick to a firey end, the same place you are now destined to go."
• In the opening cutscene of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Grim asks what kind of sicko would make him and the other characters fight each other for their amusement. Immediately after his statement, Grim, Billy, and Mandy give disapproving looks toward the player.
• Clarence's Big Chance: Parodied.
  "Looks like Cuddles, your cat, is free of its regular confinement! Why not put the fluffy bugger out of its misery of coexistence with you, you heartless monster? Go on, just hop on its skull. It'll crack like an egg."
• There's a subtle one in the 2016 Hitman. Your targets in the primary missions are scum of the earth (and you're discouraged from murdering non-targets), while the targets in the training are ISA employees acting out roles and "all weapons are simulated." So your conscience is clear, right? ...Except, in the second tutorial mission, the most blatantly-presented path to "killing" the target (and therefore the one that most first-time playthroughs go for) is to repair a disabled ejection seat in a fighter jet, then convince the target to sit in the cockpit and pull the right lever. This gets a special achievement, and is, like many other Hitman kills, hilarious to watch... unless you remember that you just launched one of your own screaming through the hangar roof, and notice the people around you break character enough to suggest that there was no simulation in place for that, he's ''really'' dead...
  • Hitman 2 retcon this detail. If you play the mission again, Diana will say it's a good thing that ejection seat includes a parachute...
• While Mafia II itself doesn't have dialogue that chastises the player for playing as a member of the mafia, between the music and the Wham Line, people who played the original Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven are probably going to feel bad about the fact the character they've been playing in II, Vito Scarletta, is one of the killers of the original game's hero, Tommy Angelo.
• Shitty Fucking Art Game has a segment that parodies player guilt-tripping by taking a page from the xkcd webcomic about making an FPS mod that randomly assigns pseudo-poignant snippets of life that get more and more ridiculous to the squares you kill, as well as indie games about war with a segment where you lazily sign documents on behalf of the Illuminati.
• The final boss of Bravely Second brings this trope into play almost by name, pausing the fight halfway through to look directly at the camera and accuse the player of making the game characters fight and die for your own twisted amusement. The protagonists aren't having it, though, and instead express their gratitude for your help and their willingness to get back up and fight for their happy ending as many times as you're willing to hit Retry.
• A Steam achievement in Civilization 6 is given for using a Culture Bomb - a way of instantly claiming several tiles - to destroy an opponent's half-completed Wonder. The achievement name is 'You Are A Terrible Person'.
• Hector and Achilles from Struggling do this during their speech at the Galaxy Brain Summit while also calling out the scientists who made them the abomination they became.
• MDK. You spend an entire game fighting an invading alien force, and then the game berates you by playing a French music video of a song that protests the Vietnam War as it's ending.
• Death end re;Quest: Ripuka is undone by pulling this trope. She takes time out of mopping the floor with the heroes yet again to call out the God of Death for pretending to be a neutral party, while staring directly into the screen and then smashing the camera. Arata Mizunashi, who at one point grapples with the idea that he might live in an "artificial" and "glitchy" world just like the cancelled MMO that much of the game takes place in, realizes exactly what is going on and turns to you for help. Your intervention boosts the party to a level where they can finally go toe-to-toe with Ripuka.
• Death end re;Quest 2: In the Fallen ending, Mai defeats the primary antagonist and slaughters their followers. However, since all of her friends and family are dead, there's nothing to prevent Marbas from completely overtaking her personality, resulting in her declaring herself the God of Death and turning her attention to you. She calls you a piece of shit for trying to dig for the game's Death Ends, sings "murderer" at you, and then tries to possess you.
• Done subtly in Brigador. When you start the main campaign, you are told that you are a mercenary mecha pilot who's been hired by a corporation called the SNC, and that your goal is to free the colony world of Novo Solo from the control of a despot who calls himself Great Leader. Great Leader's government is genuinely the science fiction equivalent of a third world country ruled by a corrupt military junta. However, as the game progresses there are increasing hints that the SNC would be much worse for Novo Solo than Great Leader. You need to pay the SNC to find out the full terms and conditions of your employment. They're willing to sell you illegal weaponry and have no problems with you using it. They pay out bonuses for any collateral damage you may inflict on the way to your objectives. The pilots they hire get more and more blatantly evil. Unlocking enough lore will reveal that the SNC was the previous ruler of the planet before Great Leader, and for all of his problems the SNC's governance was far worse for the common citizen.
• Hotline Miami does this several times.
  • This is subtly done by the gameplay and atmosphere themselves; the game is intentionally designed to be played in a hazy, adrenaline-fuelled rage. However, once every enemy in the level has been defeated, the pounding synth soundtrack that is playing in the background suddenly grinds to a halt, instead being replaced with the low humming sound of the building's fluorescent lights. This can prompt some players to stop for a moment and ponder on all of the carnage that they have just caused.
  • At the end of each level, the game describes you with a "playstyle" depending on what you did while completing the level (examples: killing several enemies while in the line of sight of several more enemies will give you the playstyle "Exhibitionist", performing five separate combos in a single level will give you the playstyle "Combo Breaker", etc.); if, while completing the level, you made heavy use of silenced firearms, sneak attacks, and/or stealth, your playstyle may be listed as "Coward". Doubles as a Take That!
  • Later in the game, it is revealed that the Biker rebelled against the evil conspiracists behind the phone-calls. This wasn't because he felt any sort of morality or guilt, but rather because he had grown bored of following the phone-calls' orders and wanted to murder more people. Since the final levels of the game will likely become repetitive (mainly due to the One-Hit Kill, Nintendo Hard nature of the game), this may be a jab towards players who are frustrated by the gameplay and care nothing for all of the mayhem that they are causing; only that, when they stop finding it entertaining, they want it to go away.
  • One of these is thrown directly into the Biker's face at the end of the game by the Janitors if he hasn't managed to solve the Puzzle. They openly mock him for his blind need for violence and brutality, and spitefully curse him when he asks for their last words (although it's entirely optional to actually kill them and they appear alive in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number regardless of your choices).
  • The Janitors also insult Jacket's blind following of their orders; they imply that there would be no actual consequences if he simply refused (apart from receiving presumably empty threats), and (in his playthrough, at least) Jacket never actually realizes who the people he is murdering are or why he is doing so, nor does he even slow down to do so. The violence that Jacket partakes in is also questioned by the trio of animal-masked people that predate each chapter, most notably with Richard's now-iconic line; "do you like hurting other people?".
  • It has also been speculated that the secret ending of the game is actually a jab towards players who want an engaging story along with the gameplay, by abruptly introducing a grand international conspiracy which does not fit with the game's aesthetic and doesn't actually answer very many of the game's raised questions.
• Stellaris has a humorous example with one of the in-game achievements. To start, the Distant Stars DLC adds an anomaly that ends with you adopting and naming a juvenile space amoeba after it imprints on the science ship that discovered it, treating it like its mother. Once it grows up, it is placed under your control and treated as a powerful naval vessel, and the in-game lore says that it has become a mascot of sorts for your empire. The Overlord DLC, meanwhile, adds the Salvagers Enclave, where you can sell your obsolete ships to be scrapped. Somebody on the dev team put two and two together, realized that somebody would try to sell the space amoeba to the Salvagers, and created an achievement called "You Monster" for doing just that.

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