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What would be the absolute worst video game world to end up in?
People often propose the question of if you were trapped in a video game world which would be best, but which one would be the absolute worst possible one. Really think about it too cause like being in like a zombie apocalypse or under a brutal dictatorship would be bad, but it could definitely get worse.
Pac-Man, in it's sheer simplicity, would be a horror show to have to live. You have to keep eating and eating and eating while death chases you constantly. You occasionally get a precious few seconds where you become the aggressor, but even when you win the day you have to do it all over again. And again. And again.
And each time death is a bit stronger and faster than it was before, but you still have to keep running and eating or succumb to oblivion.
One of the oldest DOS games I remember my dad getting was a first-person Pac-Man game wherein you could pause and look at the map, but otherwise had to pilot in first person. It was very crude, but boy was it a terrifying concept. Can't find it anywhere.
If you're thinking of 3-Demon, you can play it in this shareware collection I put together.
That’s the one! Holy crap, haven’t seen that in ages!
That sounds amazing. Do you remember what it was called?
While it's definitely not the game you were thinking of, Code Bullet recently had a video about creating the same thing but also for VR and it was also terrifying.
Reminds me of this SMBC comic about Pac-Man. Even if you don't wake up as a giant mouth, I think the "being trapped in an inescapable labyrinth" bit might be the worst part of it. Chances are you won't realize at first since you're so focused on survival and can't really see the layout, it's not like there are any noticeable markers. Once you do though, the despair would probably break your will.
I'm in agreement. In fact, I'd wager Ms. Pac-Man is marginally worse. The ghosts are smarter, the good food doesn't stay still, there's more variety to the mazes, and you've likely got to endure more harassment and lower wages than your predecessor.
"Eat or die" is just our world with extra steps, really. Take your pills, they'll help you get through the day.
Omg you remind me of the scene in The Big Lebowski where John Goodman attacks the nihilists with his bowling ball.
Man, I was going to say "The Witcher" but you've put the fear of God into me
Absolutely anything 40K.
The entire universe is legitimately a hell scape for everyone involved. Even those that live in relative tranquility get their souls eaten by a dark god.
All the video games are violent and destructive.
I've always wondered how anyone gets old enough to procreate in that universe. It's pretty nuts.
Hive cities are relatively peaceful, just not joyful or outstanding for a majority of the residents, or not to our quality of life anyway. However if you were in a 40k game (or any media really) you are almost certainly in one of the absolute worst places to ever be.
Dwarf fortress, especially if you’re an elf in my fortress.
or a dwarf in mine.
I really can't tell if this pun is intentional
Or in an undead biome.
The Sims, for a multitude of reasons.
There is a God, and it's not an uncaring God, it's not a neglectful God, it's a God that is capricious and often just a jerk.
Don't go swimming.
I can't think of a more hellish existence than living in the world of Cruelty Squad
the cruelty squad universe is just ours with more painful colors
Dear God you're right
The last of us.
You are minding your own stuff with your other fungus-head friends and then a psycho with a shotgun shows up potentially killing everything and everyone in sight
Returnal
The eternal return makes it feel straight up f-ed up, no matter how many times you die you keep on coming back. Your own body is rotting near your ship, sometimes you'll have to fight your own corrupted self. You can escape and live a normal life but once you die of old age (like that mario meme) you come back again just to suffer even more. You rise higher and higher, you sink deeper and deeper but each time you die you keep on coming back to that same place
Outside of everything mentioned so far, any GTA-style game. You're a shop owner, scraping out a living to provide for your family...oh look I'm getting robbed for the 14th time, by the same person. The cops chase them down then give up and the criminal continues on normally. Time to go home and talk to my wife how and kids how we'll have to again put off that vacation we were planning because after today's robbery funds are extra tight. And on the way home I'm carjacked by someone who looks a lot like the guy who robbed me. Insurance won't cover the full price of the car because my last 4 claims have been stolen car, car destroyed in a parking lot, car totaled because someone ran a red light in a big cop chase, and crushed by a tank.
Have you seen Ryan Reynolds' "Free Guy"? Trailer
My second favorite of his roles, right behind Deadpool.
I don't know if it's the worst. but The Division is up there. Height of the Christmas shopping season, and Covid-19's bigger, angrier brother curb stomps NYC and then goes on world tour. Everything falls apart (except, somehow, the electrical grid.) Starvation is the least of people's problems because psychos come out of the woodwork. But, good news, the government is here to help you! With guns! Then, the bad news: the government has psychos too, and they have the same Clancytech that the good guys do. And all the bad guys are roaming the streets, attacking anyone they see that doesn't want to live under their rule (or sometimes, just for giggles.)
Diablo is what comes to mind for me.
It requires the biggest suspension of disbelief, that people can maintain a society with hordes of monsters just 20ft away at all times. Like, every farm you come across already has monsters and dead bodies. How do they actually get any food?
Out of all the games i have played it would probably be Dead Space especially with how the DLC of 3 ended. Knowing that all of the other life in the universe has been wiped out and with a part of the humanity that just begs for this to happen to them too.
Also man seeing that "Extinct Animals" poster in the daycare section of the Titan featuring bees truely made me realize that it's all just hell.
The sound of 75 manhunter fennec foxes on the other side of the wall from where I've been pressed against my will into an endless production line of human-leather hats seems a bleak life in Rimworld.
FIFA. Assuming the player has full control over you, you get to sprint about continuously with no free will, living all of the misery of professional football with none of the reward. Imagine being unlucky enough to be played by some sick fuck who plays for 6 hours a day.
Have you read Player Manager? LitRPG, but the protagonist gets the powers of someone playing a football manager from a FIFA game. Far better than it has any right to be from the concept.
Sounds cool! I'll give that a read :)
Azeroth from the Warcraft series, in my opinion.
Not because it's the most terrible or horrifying outright, but because it's constantly see-sawing between peace and universe-destroying threats. Every time things seem to finally be working out and starting to improve, some new bad guy who's an existential threat to everything shows up. The whiplash and creeping anxiety that comes with things quieting down would be extremely mentally tolling.
I'm gonna go with The Land Between as featured in Elden right, sure a lot of other places are bad, but are they "You lord grafted extra bits onto himself because his daddy didn't love him enough" bad?
Just the general lore is horrific, let alone specific bits that make you got "WTF!!!!!", look at the albinauric's who maybe have the "best" general outcome, which is disfigurement and death writ large, or how that poor girl outside the castle is upset because she was afraid TO BE GRAFTED ON TO HER LORD with all her friends.
idk I'd probably pick the Lands Between before Yharnam from Bloodborne
Pathologic, easily. I'd try to explain it but I wouldn't do it anything close to justice...
It kinda depends. If it wasme who built it, I wouldn't want to live in Rollercoaster Tycoon :-D
Living in Morrowind would be bad as well. Actually every Elder scrolls game.
Also Fallout games - no need to go through atomic wasteland...
I would probably like OoenTTD world. There are no wars, no immediate danger, you can get to other olaces by various means of transport... Only those accidents when the train of one company goes through bus, or all buses actually, of the other company scare me.
My RCT games were an absolute hellscape. What could be the matter with a water park in the summer? How about a water park where there's no less than six slides heading into a massive pool, situated so just about everyone wants in... but there's no ladders out, no doors to exit the pool, so it just becomes a monstrous soup of humanity. Oh wait, I managed to get out! Wait, what's lifting me up and OH GOD NOT THE POOL AGAIN...
Earth Defence Force. Holy crap, ants once made a nest near my kitchen window, and it was an all out war between us every day. I can't imagine what it would look like if they were bigger than me. I don't even want to think about the spiders...
Chivalry.
I can't think of many things more terrifying than suddenly being transported to an unending, middle-ages battlefield, suffering gruesome injuries over and over again. The comfort of life is gone, replaced by screams and blood. Hope you're brushed up on your HEMA.
Surprised no one has mentioned Fallout 4. Always having to look over your shoulder for ghouls and raiders, and the radiation…
Last of us.
Basically no hope for humanity. Living in a borrowed time till a certain death.
Being the ball in Pong. So many missed balls traveling through the void, forever.
The incredibly niche and rightfully forgotten Atomic Runner came to my mind first reading the title. Reading the thread and thinking along the way brought up a few more but since it's so obscure imma gonna roll wit dat.
Bloodborne.. tooooo spooky. Any From Software game would be terrible.
Assuming you become either the main character or something of a similar nature, probably The Binding of Isaac. I wouldn't want to be stuck in TLoU or a Soulsborne game either, but to me, being a small child fleeing your ab*sive mother only to be trapped in a hellscape full of your literal worst nightmares sounds worse than zombies and eldritch abominations.
Any online-only game who's servers have forever shutdown. You'd simply cease to exist except as a memory of those who used to play there.
Any horror game, probably. Because you would not be a badass zombie hunter, you would probably be zombie fodder, followed by being a zombie, followed by being killed for good by a badass zombie hunter with a BFG and/or multiple-barrelled shotgun.
For as ridiculous as it sounds: Cookie Clicker. The lore of the game is worse than anything you can imagine, as the player goes from novice baker, to small business owner, to mega tycoon, to rending the very fabric of reality, all in the pursuit of cookies. Along the way you interact with and ruin the multiverse, bend/twist/break physics, use time travel irresponsibly, change grandmas into eldritch beings, and even resort to cloning yourself, all for cookies. COOKIES WILL SUBSUME THE UNIVERSE!
Scorn. The world seems heavily influenced by the nightmare that is I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream.