5. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
CD Projekt Red
The Witcher 3 is an amazing game for many reasons, not least the mind-boggling amount of freedom it offers the player to explore the land and, yes, the female of the species.
Though the game sadly doesn’t have any gay romance options for Geralt, it does allow him to womanise him way across the Continent, though horny players who try their luck a little too eagerly will end up being firmly judged for it.
Players who attempt to romance Triss and Yennefer at the same time will get invited for a ménage à trois, resulting in an hilarious cutscene where an underwear-clad Triss and Yennefer handcuff Geralt to the bed and leave him to it, having learned of his man-whoring ways.
Geralt has to wait until the next morning to be freed by Dandelion, who can’t resist the urge to rib him about it. And the next time you return to Triss and Yennefer, the’re completely dismissive of you.
CD Projekt Red just couldn’t resist throwing some shade at over-sexed players who tried to have their cake and eat it too. For shame.
4. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
1997’s mostly forgotten adaptation of The Lost World: Jurassic Park endures for just one reason: an incredible secret ending filmed for the game by star Jeff Goldblum.
If the player collects all of the DNA bonuses hidden throughout the game, they’ll be greeted with a video message from Dr. Ian Malcolm (Goldblum).
Malcolm offers the player a scarcely-enthusiastic congratulations, before urging them to “turn the thing off, for Heaven’s sakes, go outside, breathe the air, take a walk, call a member of the opposite sex.”
The message ends with Malcolm running away as the loud boom of a dinosaur’s footsteps can be heard in the distance.
Though this thankfully wasn’t quite the aggressive “f**k you” that Zelda’s golden poo debacle was, it nevertheless gently chastised the player for taking the time to carry out a totally mundane collectathon task.
Considering the game isn’t even particularly good, they’re not wrong to judge you for wasting so much time on it – even if they actually made the damn thing.
3. Dark Souls
FromSoftwareThose who still get their games shipped physically might be lucky enough to occasionally receive them a day or two early, but if you dared to play Dark Souls before its official release date, FromSoftware weren’t much happy about it.
Rather than simply stewing about it, the developer besieged premature players by invading their game with enormously powerful level 145 Black Phantoms, who could easily make mincemeat out of anyone playing a few days early.
Because Dark Souls wasn’t hard enough already, right?
Granted, you could just play the game offline and avoid FromSoft’s top-notch trolling, but to experience the game unharassed as it was fully intended, multiplayer and all, players had to wait until the official street date.
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1. Drawn To Death
SCE San Diego
If the latest game from God of War creator David Jaffe passed you by when it quietly released back in 2017, don’t feel bad about it. Drawn to Death is a garish mish-mash of awkward combat and try-hard style, but at least Jaffe had the good sense to let players know right away.
The game’s tutorial alone perfectly encompasses its hateful, petulant attitude towards the player, presumably trying to be charmingly obnoxious in the way that Deadpool is, but failing cataclysmically.
The tutorial, conducted by a foul-mouthed frog, sees the player called a “f**king idiot” numerous times and sarcastically dubbed a “bloody genius” as the creature explains the controls. He then goes on to comment how even a baby can get through the platforming tutorial.
This antagonistic tone is obviously all part of the game’s intended shtick, presumably aimed primarily at teenage boys, but as an adult, it wears you down incredibly quickly, to say nothing of how thoroughly cack the actual core gameplay is.
Surprising no-one, Drawn to Death died fast and has largely been forgotten by pretty much anyone who actually bothered to play it.
1. The Witness
Thekla, Inc.
Getting to even the “soft” ending of Jonathan Blow’s mind-melting puzzle game The Witness is a gargantuan task, but the most dedicated players will push ahead to tackle its ultimate challenge, aptly called The Challenge.
The Challenge requires players to complete 14 line-drawing puzzles in just 6.5 minutes, and to make matters worse, pausing the game resets the puzzle, and its content is procedurally generated, meaning there are no guides available online.
The only way to beat it is to harbour an extremely deep understanding of the game’s intricate and expansive puzzle logic.
Though successful players would understandably be expecting something pretty epic at the end, Blow decided to casually mock players for their time investment instead.
The “reward” for completing The Challenge is…a 58-minute lecture from 2002, where video game developer Brian Moriarty explains the history of Easter eggs throughout art (such as in Shakespeare’s plays and even the Bible).
Throughout the lecture Moriarty makes not-so-subtle references to the pointless pursuit of hidden goodies in art, and as a player, it’s tough not to feel like Blow is laughing at you – over 58 excruciatingly boring minutes, no less.
The recording was so baffling that many players still believe it contains the game’s final, definitely final secret…somewhere. To date, however, nobody has uncovered it.
Given the absurd difficulty of The Challenge and being “forced” to listen to a dry-as-sawdust lecture afterwards, believing that there has to be something else is perhaps the sanest option.
Otherwise, the more likely truth is enough to make you wonder why you even bothered.
