Everything Trying to Kill You

Tonight on "You're Gonna Get It, Charlie Brown"...

"Did I just die by walking into the fucking door!? Yeah! Everything kills you, literally everything."

—The Angry Video Game Nerd on Dragon's Lair (NES)

Video games struggling for creativity will invent unlikely obstacles.

If a level in a Platformer takes place in a mountain, it's unrealistic you'd run into sequential lava pits, but there's a logic in that you want to avoid the obvious, skin-boiling danger (though you'll be okay if you just don't touch it). But in some games, you can be injured by the strangest things. Stumbling onto a flying soccer ball hurts just as much as being run over by a car. All manner of inanimate objects seem primed and ready to hurt you, especially if the setting doesn't allow for more extravagant opponents. In some cases, just to really hammer the point home that the game's creators are true bastards, your character will be a One-Hit-Point Wonder, and the slightest injury will make you explode into a fountain of blood.

You can usually blame Collision Damage for this.

And heaven help you if the place is inhabited. Nearly every living thing in the area suddenly gets a taste for your tender flesh, even if they're normally herbivores. This may be a modern take on the older version of this trope: in old adventure stories, if the hero goes camping or even just for a walk through the forest, he can expect to be attacked by bears, stalked by wolves, jumped by mountain lions, infected by poison ivy, torn apart by thorns and so on. Mosquitoes will be strangely uninterested in him. (This is... not exactly how it works in Real Life.)

Is nothing safe? Walls? The sun? The moon? The boundary of the screen?

While a common trope in the Nintendo Hard generation of games, this has more to do with old-style games than difficulty. Many older games were platform games, where the objective is primarily to get from the beginning of the level to the end. Memory was at a premium, so pretty much anything added to the game needed a purpose. And in a platformer, most things should be either power ups or obstacles, things that make it a challenge (and thus fun) to get from Point A to Point B. Adventure Game designers, especially those at Sierra, also delighted in finding new and interesting ways to kill the player character; with no quantified attributes, such a game's hero could only survive or not survive.

Some games that normally avoid this will design a deliberately ludicrous yet highly dangerous enemy/obstacle for comedic value. A Platform Hell game will often take this trope to ludicrous places for comedy. See also Malevolent Architecture and Death World.

Compare: Animals Hate Him; Super-Persistent Predator; Damn, Nature! You Scary; and Books That Bite.

Examples of Everything Trying to Kill You include:

Video game examples

Action Adventure

  • Most of Ecco the Dolphin's foes are logical for a dolphin - sharks and jellyfish for the most part. The angry crabs and giant water spiders are a bit weird, but the Prehistoria levels take it to the extreme with trilobites and giant seahorses who shoot their young at you.
  • Enemies in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 had the rather alarming tendency to forget who they were fighting and come after you. This is even worse when demons and demon hunters become best of friends for the amount of time it takes to kill your character.
  • Several games in The Legend of Zelda series contain rooms where the floor tiles will fly up to attack you. The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening takes this to a whole new level, where one boss IS the floor of the room you just walked in.
    • There's also a pottery version of the homicidal floor tiles.
    • The door traps in the Fire Temple (from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time) that crush you when you try to open one of them.
  • Legend of the Mystical Ninja, in addition to having ordinary citizens of peaceful, feudal Japanese towns trying to kill you, has a particularly mean enemy: deer. The deer deal out a ridiculous amount of damage, they bound around very quickly and haphazardly so they're difficult to dodge, and worst of all, you lose health if you hurt them. Because you're beating up on deer, you jerk.
  • The Castlevania series loves this trope. Sure, you're going up against Dracula so monsters like skeletons and zombies are obvious. The (empty) coffins in Super Castlevania IV fit with the theme, though common sense doesn't explain why they would be so aggressive. But armadillos, frogs, toads, birds, bats, snakes, plants, chefs, butlers, maids and sometimes previous teammates all want you dead. Most of Dracula's villainy is informed/off screen, so it makes you wonder if the Belmonts and company are actually just colossal jerks who no one likes.

Well this is bound to be a lovely resurrection party... Oh Christ, it's one of those guys with a whip again. He'll probably whip all the party guests to death, snuff out our candles and steal our food.

    • The more recent, Metroidvania style games have begun explaining it by having them all be demons or ghosts. They're still absurdly aggressive for their jobs, though.
  • The enemies of the SNES game of The Wizard of Oz include birds, stalactitish lemons, cactus cats, plants on unicycles, chattery teeth, hands of grandfather clocks, walking chairs, blobs, flying blue elephants, dripping water, bouncing pumpkins and buzzsaws. Plus rats.
  • Strangely, in NES Rambo game, the entire wildlife hates Rambo. That includes Giant Spider, tigers, flamingos, flies and birds.
  • Aquaria advertises over 175 unique creatures to discover. This is a list of the ones that are harmless: small fish, some (but not all) eels, a couple species of jellyfish, macaws, and monkeys. Everything else hates you, and wishes to feast upon your delicious, juicy corpse.
  • Literally every moving creature in Legend of Kalevala wants to kill the protagonist. Lampshaded and justified: the Ancestors programmed them to attack the Kuririi, thus making them hostile to the player character and the body that he inhabits.
  • Justified in Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku II and Buu's Fury - most of the animals you fight are still feeling the effects of the Black Water Mist from the anime's Garlic Jr. saga. Most of the other non-boss enemies are Red Ribbon Army robots or various unemployed mercenaries.


Action Game

  • Paperboy is infamous for having everything from runaway lawnmowers to breakdancers to the Grim friggin' Reaper running around the middle of the street for no discernible reason other than to mess with the eponymous deliverer.
    • That's probably why his exploits made the front page of the newspaper every day. In fact, one theory that's been floated is that the eponymous delivery person is, in fact, dead, and the delivery route is his personal purgatory. Only by delivering the paper and surviving every day for a week is he able to escape.
  • Brain Dead 13. Everything. From the leaves in the hedge maze, to the fire in the stove, to the bookworms in the library.
  • Besides cars, motorcycles, trucks, snakes and alligators trying to kill him, Frogger also demonstrates Super Drowning Skills.
  • Home Alone 2 for the NES and SNES was ridiculous. Not only did every random stranger in the hotel try to get you, but so did vacuum cleaners, luggage, and mop buckets (both the moving mop and the inanimate bucket).
    • The Infogrames staff must have played this game before coding Tintin in Tibet. In the hotel level alone, you could get Collision Damage (and lose one of your four hit points) from waiters carrying a platter, maids vacuuming the floor, luggage carelessly knocked over by said maids, and little dogs that don't bite. Oh, and the timer too.
    • But then, the entire premise of Home Alone was that Kevin made his house/hotel room into a place where everything was trying to kill Harry and Marv. Turnabout's fair play.
  • The Jurassic Park game on the Sega Genesis. Cute little lizards who take half your health, climbing ropes who are vertical poison ivies, Pteronodon carrying you back to the top at the cost of half your health... Also goes with Nintendo Hard.
  • This page would be remiss without a mention of a Sega Genesis X-Men game whose first level started in a jungle. And in this jungle, getting a lance thrown at you did damage, getting carried off by a Giant Flyer did damage... and having a dragonfly buzz past you did damage. The hell?
  • Bomberman runs with this trope in every game since the beginning. The Big Bad's Mooks, bugs, statues, rocks, fish, robots, floor tiles, your own bombs, items, and standard stage hazards. It really gets ridiculous though, with butterflies, snowflakes, penguins, clowns, Funny Animal mice holding balloons, panda/umbrella...things, snowmen, trees, and even wandering clouds who pour down raindrops. No matter how cute and innocuous it looks, if it doesn't hatch from a giant egg, it will kill you (or your kangaroo/dinosaur) on contact.
    • Bosses, of course, jack this Up to Eleven ranging from typical dragons, giant robots, and vehicles to sphinx with rockets in its shoulders, a crystalline ice spider, a giant electrical catfish, and a crazy dominatrix Catgirl.
  • Time Gal on the Sega CD. That girl has no allies whatsoever. It seems that every era she gets transported to only serves the purpose of pitting her against something or another.
  • In DmC, the reboot of Devil May Cry, Dante fights in a parallel dimension, Limbo, where the city itself literally tries to kill him.


Adventure Game

  • Sierra celebrated the way of character death, embraced it, became one with it. Many Sierra adventure games would kill for making one seemingly innocuous false step, and then mock you for getting yourself killed. It became slowly more forgiving with time, replacing Unwinnable situations with instadeaths (which is a good thing, kind of) and eventually granting an "Oops" button or two.
    • Take the second Laura Bow game. It would kill the title character by means of an automobile that appeared out of nowhere if she stepped off the pavement onto a seemingly empty road. You were apparently supposed to look at the road first to confirm that no cars were approaching, but the same would happen even if you did that and the game told you it was all clear. (It expected you to look both ways before crossing the road. Just looking once wasn't enough, in one of Sierra's more... pedantic puzzles. Luckily, you can get everywhere by taxi, and just skip the stupidity.) Another scene would kill you if you wandered into a dark passage without a light. Somehow, a woman in her early twenties would be swarmed and overpowered by quite ordinary bats—unless she had a light to scare them with.
    • Not all that many games make players try to kill off their characters in every possible way, even fewer have them enjoy it. The latter include the farcical Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry series, where even the narrator is basically a Deadpan Snarker. A fan website has cataloged 67 distinct ways to die in Space Quest V alone. In Space Quest III, trying to pick up a simple piece of metal scrap one room away from the start of the game would result in Roger cutting himself, severing an artery, and dying of blood loss within seconds. Total play time to first death in that situation? About 20 seconds.
    • Even the slot machine can kill you. Get three skull-n-crossbones, and it turns you into dust with its built-in Disintegrator Ray. The slot machine is named "Slots O' Death"... you could rig the machine in the remake to beat it quickly, but in the original, save often and hope for the best.
      • The game even warns you by showing a little robot with a broom picking up the dust pile of the last loser and ditching it out the back of the bar. If you go behind the bar, there's a huge dust pile of all the people who lost recently.
    • In one area of Space Quest II the more observant player could notice a square of outlined grass in the terrain. If you attempted the command "look at trap" the narrator would promptly berate you for your overly suspicious approach to the game. The noted area was, of course, a pit complete with spikes.
    • Space Quest IV introduces the "Smell" and "Taste" icons to the game interface, which have no plot relevance whatsoever; not once in the entire game will you ever need to smell or taste anything in order to progress. Instead, they exist almost exclusively for the purpose of killing yourself in hilarious ways.
    • Leisure Suit Larry, which should be a nonviolent mature game, has so many ways to kill your character. Especially the second game: there's at least five ways to die at the hands of KGB agents, four ways to die from the "helicopter girls", three separate ways to die from "Mama Bimbo", two lethal chefs, and a guy named Carlos, who, thanks to U.S. foreign aid, has many extra bullets that he enjoys firing for amusement - on you. Throw in many Unwinnable situations, and you are in for a very frustrating game.
    • Leisure Suit Larry 2 is designed in such a way that you have to die. For example, at one point of the game, you have to take a hair pin out of a plate of food. However, the only way to know of the hair pin is to choke from it. Also, in a later point of the game, the KGB agents even say: "Caught again!" Why do they even bother?
      • Furthermore, at some point you gain points for picking up spinach dip for no good reason. Later, you end up starving in a lifeboat, and will automatically eat the spinach dip, thus dying from salmonella poisoning. The "solution" to this "puzzle" is to throw away the dip after picking it up. The dip serves no purpose. None. You can completely ignore it, or you can take it and eat it before it goes bad. However, this will cost you points. To get the maximum points from the dip, you have to take it and throw it away after the lifeboat you're in hits the water. Guide Dang It, all right.
    • A related Space Quest example is the unstable ordnance in the fourth game. You gain points for picking it up for no reason, then die if you're still carrying it a minute later. The "solution" again is to pick it up, then put it down.
      • Hilariously, the flag take caused the unstable ordnance to kill you was only for one very specific event. If you pick up the unstable ordnance after that event, it will never blow up and never kill you, which is strange considering the bumps and bruises Roger receives later in the game are much worse than the bump that causes the ordnance to blow up in the first place.
    • The Police Quest series is just plain atrocious. Sonny Bonds, a trained police homicide detective, would be killed by a speeding car if he tried crossing the street without pushing the walk button on a nearby streetlight first.
      • Even more bizarre is the paradox contained in the sequence in the first game in the series, in which Bonds had to go on patrol in a squad car. If you followed proper procedure and inspected each wheel of the vehicle by walking around it before driving off, there would be nothing wrong with it. If you failed to do so, one wheel would without fail be faulty and you would soon suffer a flat tire, which prematurely ended the game even though Bonds was not injured at all.
      • In the third game, a mere loony can kill you with a single swing of his fist. And you are not allowed to shoot him (or you lose).
      • Also in the third game, if you pull someone over while driving, then get out of your car to talk to the person, walking around the car in the wrong direction will get you killed.
    • Even Police Quest is trumped by Codename: ICEMAN, where you play an elite multi-skilled spy. Every single thing in the game goes wrong unless you explicitly check it. The guard that asks for your ID gives you the wrong ID back, leading to a dead end unless you bother to check. Machines break down with no warning unless you explicitly oiled them in the last chapter, even though that's the technician's job. And you die for no reason if you walk away from a cardiac arrest victim, because it would be heartless not to give her CPR, which is nigh impossible without reading the manual.
    • The character of the adventure/RPG hybrid Quest for Glory series has hit points, so a majority of hazards are not immediately fatal. Still, there's a number of situations that result in an immediate game over. In the first game of the series: If you attempt to pick up any item in the hermit's lair, he'll teleport you into a waterfall, drowning you; if you attempt to pick any lock during the day, the hero will refuse, saying that it isn't safe and that he ought to wait until dark ... except for the door of the guardhouse, which you can attempt to pick in broad daylight and in front of the sheriff, leading in your immediate arrest; also, if you attempt to pick any single lock one too many times in a row (at night), you "make too much noise" and get arrested without any chance of escape; using a lockpick on yourself will make the hero pick his nose with it and (unless your skill is high enough) resulting in brain hemorrhage and death (quite easy to do in the VGA version; in the EGA version, you at least had to type PICK NOSE, making it a fine Easter Egg); you need to say a password to enter the witch's hut; if you say it too close to the hut, it'll descend on you, crushing you to death; ordering (and drinking) Dragon's Breath in the tavern also results in your death. Not to mention several Unwinnable situations.
      • Also, in the thieves' guild, if you walk in front of the chief as he throws knives at a dartboard, one will hit you in the chest and you die. Also also, the three stooges, the antwerp-tripwire, getting danced to death by the faeries, damaging the sacred tree, just about anything involving Baba Yaga, failing to solve the final bandit puzzle, etc.
      • Not to mention if you stood under the portcullis in front of the baron's castle the guard would drop it on your head. Considering how long it took to start to drop, and how slowly it was lowered you had to be deliberately trying to get skewered by it.
      • You'll also die from "not buying a saurus" in the second game, because said saurus plays a (terminally minor) role in the plot later, which would be left unrevealed if you don't buy it. However, the character selling the saurus gets increasingly persistent if you refuse his offers, eventually flat-out stating that you NEED this saurus.
        • Specifically, not buying the saurus results in you dying, within feet of the entrance to the city, because (and the game over windows states this) you didn't buy a saurus. It was Anvilicious for a reason, but still...
    • King's Quest and its sequels had their fair share of ludicrous character deaths. For one, the minute you start the first game, if you move too close to the castle moat, you will fall in and die. You will also inexplicably get killed by a sliding rock if you push it from the wrong angle. That's right, pushing a rock away causes it to fall on you.
      • AGD Interactive also proved that they could do it too if they really tried in their Fan Remake (entire reworking, more like) of King's Quest II Romancing the Throne. There is one location containing six fairly innocent-looking rocks around the base of a larger one. Examining any but one of these, however, will cause it to explode and kill you.
      • On the first screen of the Land of the Dead in King's Quest VI Heir Today Gone Tomorrow, there are two zombies that can come over and touch you to death in fewer seconds than the immediately preceding cutscene lasts.
    • Nothing in Leisure Suit Larry 5 can kill you. Nothing. Even if you try to electrocute yourself with a wall outlet. There is also exactly one Unwinnable situation in the game due to a bug.
  • LucasArts, the other major publisher of adventure games, was kinder and gentler than Sierra, and its games were more cartoonish. Character death was possible in its more realistic games, but it would take blatantly stupid actions. In general, LucasArts believed that players should not be punished for experimenting with their games, seeing as most of the time puzzle solutions in adventure games in general had a tendency to be on the obscure side. This policy was adopted by LucasArts during the development of The Secret of Monkey Island, but dying was still frequent in their earlier titles such as Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.
    • Death was rare but possible in the Full Throttle adventure game. Each time Ben was killed, the game would automatically backtrack to the point where the fatal mistake was made, allowing you to try it again—with Ben saying quickly over the black screen, "Lemme try that again". This is because, similar to Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (see below), because the game is being told in flashback by Ben (the opening monologue makes this clear).
      • Death only becomes possible in Full Throttle in the endgame, when it's made blatantly clear that you're in a life-or-death chase sequence.
    • The Monkey Island games, for example, averted this trope. Nothing could kill its hero, Guybrush Threepwood (well, almost nothing), or even do permanent harm. Not even getting repeatedly punched sky-high by the Big Bad.
      • The only way to die in The Secret of Monkey Island is a major Easter Egg by its rarity alone: After Guybrush gets thrown into the bay by Sheriff Shinetop, simply wait ten minutes (which is how long Guybrush can hold his breath) until he drowns.
      • The same game has another sequence where Guybrush can walk off a cliff. A Sierra-style death screen comes up, followed moments later by Guybrush bouncing back onto the cliff's edge, with two words of explanation: "Rubber Tree".
      • Guybrush could also die in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge if you took too long escaping the Death Trap in LeChuck's lair, but since the game was told in flashback form, Elaine (to whom Guybrush was telling the story) would point out that Guybrush couldn't have died if he was here talking to her, and Guybrush backtracks his story. In the easy mode play, it's impossible for Guybrush to die, and the Death Trap is solved automatically (via an alternative bodily fluid).
      • In The Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush has to fake his death to progress in the game, prompting one character to comment "Funny, I didn't think you could die in LucasArts adventure games." He fakes said death (at a later point in the game he states that he simply went into a temporary coma) by usage of combining medicine and alcohol, an act that he lampshades by noting that if he wasn't a "lovably inept cartoon character with the potential for a few more sequels", he more than likely would have been killed by doing this. You can see the whole event here.
      • In Escape from Monkey Island, the one possibility of death is a brief time-traveling episode in a swamp. Future Guybrush would tell present Guybrush things and give him things in a specific order, and if that order was not replicated exactly by the player (when the player controls future Guybrush), a time vortex would open and swallow everything. (And that doesn't really end the game - you get another try to do the sequence right. For shocks, you can also try shooting your alter ego with the gun he had handed you...)

Guybrush: Wow, I guess it's true that gun owners are nine times more likely to shoot themselves.

      • Another possibility of a Game Over in Escape is that he can stay underwater, but after 8 minutes on the first dive, Guybrush says, "I'm running low on air." If kept under water for another 2 minutes, he decides to head back up to the surface. It is on the second dive that if he stays underwater for ten minutes, he will drown, with no second chances this time.
      • And Tales of Monkey Island shows the only time in the Monkey Island series that Guybrush's death by the Big Bad's Cutlass of Kaflu at the end of Chapter 4 (and repeated disposessions of his corpse while on Flotsam in Chapter 5) is not a Game Over or an Easter egg, but rather story-related in order to continue on with the progress of the game.
    • Also inverted in Loom: try as you might, there is no way you can get yourself killed.
      • Which is kind of funny, as you end up fighting against the incarnation of Chaos and his/her/its army of the undead. Various people you meet over the course of the game get killed. Your stepmother (who is kind and loving, not a Wicked Stepmother) gets blown up. The universe gets ripped in half. The ending makes it look like you are one of the very, very few people in the world who makes it out of the game alive.
  • This trope was wonderfully inverted in The Neverhood, where there was only one way in the whole game to die: jumping into a big pit with a sign over it that said "Do not jump in this pit. You will die."
    • It was even lampshaded in the manual, where it explained that there was only one way to die in the game, and that it was well signposted.
  • The text adventure Bureaucracy, written by Douglas Adams, has you dealing with a series of what would normally be minor, petty annoyances. However, these annoyances raise your character's blood pressure, and if your blood pressure goes up too high, you die of a brain aneurysm.
  • Shadowgate. Let's see: the third screen in a rather marvelous book is hiding a plot essential MacGuffin. Take the book and you die, no warning or 'save'. A few rooms over, you find a long hall with eyes staring out of the darkness. A bunch of items are on the ground. Take the wrong one, and you die. A few rooms later, you face three mirrors. You must break one to continue. They are indistinguishable. Break the wrong one, and you die. Your game is timed by a torch that burns out, and you must find more torches to continue. If your torch goes out, the darkness kills you. Even if you are standing in a bright, exterior courtyard or a well-lit interior room with its own source of light and more torches for you to take. Fortunately, Death Is a Slap on The Wrist in this game, unless, of course, you don't have the needed torches to have the time it takes to solve some Nintendo Hard riddles.
  • Interactive Fiction games are notorious for everything being able to kill you in some way. One of the funniest is in Zork II, where you couldn't figure out what to do with a bucket and in frustration typed "KICK THE BUCKET". The game was happy to oblige.
    • Lampshaded a bit in Zork 1 if you eat a garlic clove: "What the heck. You won't make any friends this way, but nobody around here is too friendly anyhow. Gulp!" Surprise! Guess who can't fend off a vampire bat later in the game!
  • In Spelunker you can die because you're in mid-air: just fall from any height higher than your character is and you die. This means you can lose all three of the lives you start with and get a Game Over less than three seconds after starting the game.


Driving Game

  • Mario Kart can be accused of this if you are in first place. Between everyone behind you out to spill your blood by spamming powerful items at you, several that can't be blocked, and trying to dodge track obstacles like pipes, thwomps, or fireballs, this is a game that wants to make sure you don't have it easy.
  • Would you believe this can even happen in a racing game? In Split Second, traps and explosives, called Power Plays, are littered around the track to take out your opponents with. But no matter how much stuff goes boom in a normal race, this is nothing compared to Detonator mode - one lap around the track, practically every single Power Play triggering. Pass by something, and the probability that it will explode, collapse, break loose, slide in front of you, and generally screw you is 90%.


First-Person Shooter

  • While not exactly everything trying to kill you, all of the killable characters in the PC game Vivisector: Beast Inside—whether they're humans or Half Human Hybrids—attack you the moment you first load up the game, even after you switch from the former's side to the latter. There's an attempt at handwaving, dealing with some flimsy excuse of the humans not authorizing your presence in the game's setting and the hybrids being programmed to see humans as the enemy, but really, it's just an attempt to bring in Fake Difficulty to the game.
    • Similarly, Shadow the Hedgehog has both good and evil enemies, and they'll all attack Shadow regardless of his Karma Meter (except when they're busy fighting each other!)
    • Another example of this sort of thing can be found in Far Cry 2. Ostensibly you are a mercenary working for one side in a civil war in Africa. They try to Hand Wave it in game by claiming you're a disposable asset that nobody knows about. In reality even when working a mission for one side you will be attacked by both sides. Constantly.
  • In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, when you stumble on a fight between zombies and Germans, both sides immediately forget each other and make a beeline for you. During WW 2 the US Army and the Wehrmacht were not on the best possible terms, but they might make a temporary alliance against the undead.
  • Halo's physics engine lets anything kill you if it's big enough or traveling fast enough; from traffic cones to pieces of an exploded Banshee hurtling through the air.
  • A popular game mode in FPS's is Free-for-all, which pits every player against every other one in disorganized chaos.


Light Gun Game

  • The 80's light gun arcade game Who Dunit requires you to not only guide a detective through a mansion, but protect him from things like pimps throwing their hats at him, and beach balls bouncing all over the place. Because anything that touches him will instantly skeletonize him, his soul drifting away. Yes, even the beach balls.
    • Another Exidy light gun game, Crossbow, is pretty bad about this one as well; the Heroic Fantasy warriors you're defending will go up in flames if anything touches them, even if the implement of their destruction was a coconut thrown by a monkey. But hey, it beats getting turned into a skeleton by a beach ball.


Miscellaneous Games

  • Pretty much every object in the games on the Action 52 multicart is trying to kill you. Elton John kills you (Non Human). Money kills you (Streemerz). File cabinets kill you (French Baker). The floor kills you (Meong). Pasta kills you (Alfredo, only playable via some emulators). Bowling balls kill you (Hambo) Dildos kill you (Thrusters). You'll wish that the game would self destruct and kill you in real life.
    • Star Evil is pure evil with the way it puts your ship two inches from a cinderblock at the start. And the stage boss moves like a DUI driver (according to mpn1990's Unlicensed Garbage show on YouTube).


MMORPGs

  • Kingdom of Loathing has its fair share of unlikely enemies, including hippies, ninja snowmen, animated nightstands, anime smileys, fire-breathing ducks, pastiches of characters from Final Fantasy VII, and the Guy Made of Bees. Then there's the many twists on standard RPG enemies, like Orcish frat boys, apathetic lizardmen, misspelled undead (including zmobies, lihcs, and ghuols), and the 99 Bottles of Beer On A Golem. There's also an area (accessible only while high on astral mushrooms) where you can fight things like some really interesting wallpaper and the urge to stare at your hands. Really.
    • "Crimbo" 2010 introduced exciting new enemies, such as the Tedious Spreadsheet, the Hideous Slideshow and the Water Cooler. Oh yes, and there were elves climbing out of the toilets, too.
  • This is pretty much the entire plot of zOMG, which features enemies called "the Animated".
    • Not to mention the cute pink balls of fluff that can kill you with one hit.
  • The MUD Aardwolf takes this trope to utterly ludicrous levels, as some magically enchanted areas have A Wizard Did It (literally) related creatures, from the traditional walking broom to irritated neck-ties, nightstands, gardening equipment, cabinets, violent cacti, and man-eating pot pies. D&D wishes it had gotten this crazy with mimics and evil sorcerer aides. To make matters worse (read: funnier), a generic NPC creator was used in the construction of this MUD. So it's not uncommon to see people walking around with Boots skinned from A Lampshade or A Helm skinned from A Shovel.
  • In EVE Online, the safest way to play is to assume that everyone who isn't a close friend of yours will try to kill you if you have something valuable that will drop when you die. Many players don't even care about gain and do it simply For the Evulz. The central part of the galaxy you live in is usually safe to fly around in because the npc police are guaranteed to charge in and kill an attacker in 30 seconds or less (although that leaves the attacker a tiny window to successfully kill YOU). If you move out to the low security zone, it is literally full of roving pirate players looking for an easy target to dogpile and kill. If you make it out to zero security space, you'll run into the player alliances (who usually war with each other) who will shoot you on sight for tresspassing. Joining one of those alliances and working hard to support them and fight in their wars is often considered a way to become much safer from random hostility than staying in low security or high security space.
  • World of Warcraft seems to have this in spades. You'll realise this as you count up the hours you spend running away from increasingly violent and aggressive deer, flowers, and moths - on top of the demons, dragons, and old gods (aka Faceless Ones), of course.
  • Runescape has Ape Atoll. Pretty much everything is out to get you on this island, ranging from monkey archers (or even zombie monkeys) to poisonous snakes to birds to scorpions. The monkeys that aren't trying to kill you are not only trying to send you to jail, but make sure that you stay there. Unless you happen to be able to transform into a monkey. Into which case, the island is essentially harmless.

Platform Game

  • Metroid. You're stuck on a planet where if it is moving it will try to kill you. Even some of the plants will do damage to you in the original Metroid Prime.
    • In Metroid Prime, most of the plants stay still. (The rare Bloodflower, which spits stuff at you, is an exception.) In Super Metroid, they actually try to eat you if you fall into them. And some have extending claws that try to grab you.
      • It got to the point where the most amazing thing in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is that there is a moving character who isn't trying to kill you.
      • Even the air tries to kill you in that game. I am not even joking. The air.
      • Super Metroid has a grand total of four organisms that never try to kill you, and you can play through the whole game and never see any of them. The one exception to this are the living nests that will only send other organisms to kill you if you shoot them.
  • Every moving thing in the Contra series. Of course, your muscular, strong, heavy weapon-carrying hero is nothing but a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
  • The Unfair Platformer. Yup, it's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
    • Beware of message boxes!
  • Scrap Brain Zone, Mystic Cave Zone, Metropolis Zone, Marble Garden Zone, Sandopolis Zone, and Death Egg Zone in the original Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis games fall under this category. Also, Mad Gear Zone in Sonic 4 - especially Act 3.
  • The Genesis game Greendog turned this into the plot: the eponymous character had been cursed by an amulet that made all animals attack him on sight.
  • Super Mario Bros.: One instance you're stomping flying Bloopers, another has you running from unkillable Chinese Vampires, the next has you being stalked by candle fires, and then you find yourself chased by an angry sun. Yes... even the sun wants to kill you. Is the Princess really worth braving all that?!
  • The NES platform game Monster Party had some pretty out-there enemies. Disembodied legs stuck in the ground and walking pants are just two examples. Then there's the bosses, which include a giant bubble-spitting pitcher plant, a giant snake with Medusa hair that throws tsuchinoko (a type of semi-mythical snake famous in Japanese cryptozoology; Dunsparce is a Tsuchinoko) at you, and a giant fried shrimp which eventually morphs into an onion ring, then a kebab.
    • Let's not forget the rock n' roll player who'd make you "Face the music!", The giant cat who threw killer kittens at you, drops of blood that'd mysteriously hurts you in Stage 2... on the other hand, there was also that dead spider that said "Sorry, I'm Dead" in Stage 1 and those zombie dancers who you'd beat only if you didn't attack them and watched them dance.
  • Abe's Oddysee (sic) has about 5 friendly NPCs in the entire game. And they don't talk, they just sit there. Everything else is actively dedicated to the death of our blue friend. The wildlife, the soldiers, even his own people, for whom he plays The Messiah (literally) will greet him with a lethal slingshot if he doesn't whistle right. Add to that no means of self-defense, and you have Abe's Oddysee.
  • The freeware game I Wanna Be the Guy uses this to and past the limit, featuring killer spikes, apples giant cherries Delicious Fruit that can also fall up and the moon as the most common killers in the game. Add to that ripped-off enemies from 8-bit games, several innocuous-looking objects suddenly dropping lethally on your character (including a star, thunderbolts, a glass of wine thrown by the Symphony of the Night Dracula during a cutscene and a killer pop-up), a Tetris segment where you must avoid being squashed by the blocks, a floor of spikes that suddenly develops wheels and chases you and even a killer save point just before the final boss to get a hair-tearing frustration masterpiece.
  • Nearly everything in the video game movie Warlock could harm you, including water dripping from the ceiling and otherwise harmless birds if they fly into you. Even worse, there's one stationary hazard, a thorn vine trap, that will damage you even if you cheated and used a Game Genie to give your character unlimited life and/or gave you unlimited Mercy Invincibility. Then again, you could also be killed with those cheats on through Super Drowning Skills and staying immersed in lava.
  • Jumping Flash. Killer mosquitoes, dragonflies, strange creatures with cannons for mouths that launch missiles, a diversity of frogs, giant mechanical scorpions... just about the only thing in the game that isn't trying to kill you are the air whales.
  • Jumping Flash 2 has a reverse of this trope in both regular and Extra world 6-1, where you can actually safely stand on one of the many rotating spike balls in the level.
  • While a relatively friendly game, the Banjo-Kazooie series is jam-packed with all manner of inanimate objects that come to life, sprout cartoonish eyeballs, and try to kill you. The Freezeezy Peak level in Banjo-Kazooie features the Sir Slush enemies, giant, immobile laughing snowmen who are positioned all over the damn place and will endlessly barrage you with snowballs until you kill them, in addition to the Chinks, which are giant ice cubes with eyes that are near invisible before they spring to life and come spinning after you. Also annoying are the Boom Boxes in Rusty Bucket Bay, crates of TNT that chase you and explode, which are accompanied by bouncing life preservers. This is taken to even more ridiculous heights in the sequel, Banjo-Tooie, where you're frequently pitted against bouncing shovels, coin-spitting slot machines, flowers, various nuts and bolts, oil drums that release suffocating gas (which also has eyes and chases you), more crates of TNT, and so on. This even spreads into some of the bosses, such as Old King Coal, a massive, animate lump of carbon; Mr. Patch, a skyscraper-sized, dinosaur-shaped inflatable toy that coughs up exploding beachballs; Weldar, an enormous welding torch; and Terry, a giant pterodactyl that spits out "Mucoids", which are giant blobs of green snot with eyes that try to kill you.
    • And then there is Conker's Bad Fur Day... featuring The Great Mighty Poo (An opera-singing animated cesspool that has you collect kernels of corn for it, and in gratitude, tries to kill you).
  • The entire collection of bosses (and many enemies) in the Wario Land series. Last time you heard of a living cuckoo clock that tries to electrocute the character and use a grabbing claw, or a ghostly mouse riding an inflatable teddy bear being a boss and trying to kill you?
    • The latest game takes it a bit further, with an evil race car driver, robo clown with flamethrower and frying pan riding duck chef as bosses.
  • Believe it or not, the Barbie game for the SNES falls under this trope terribly. Any and everything that hits you takes away life—people, beach balls, low-flying birds, frisbees, snowballs, clods of dirt, and the list goes on...
    • The Barbie game for the NES is even worse: pizzas, jellyfish (complete with creepy music), clothing, water spouts, kites, tennis balls, skates, soda...
  • In the first Tomb Raider, absolutely everything and everyone is out for Lara's blood. A few of the later games, however, had people and/or creatures that wouldn't attack her unless she attacked them first (examples: the warrior monks in the second game, and the monkeys and the gang members from certain levels of the third game). However, even if you attack just one of the monks in the second game, every single monk in the entire level will be trying to skewer you.
  • Sunday Funday puts you up against plumbers, disco dancers, businessmen, joggers, big-headed women wearing pearl necklaces... All of them want you dead for the terrible crime of going to Sunday School.
    • This game was a 'Christianized' Retool of earlier title Menace Beach. All they did was change the storyline ('rescue your girlfriend' is now 'get to Sunday School') and the sprites (from somewhat more acceptably threatening ninjas, evil clowns etc. to more innocuous yet equally threatening enemies).
  • Beautifully inverted in indie game Karoshi. Absolutely nothing is trying to kill you, and some things will even prevent your death. Unfortunately, the point of the game is to die...
  • In Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, besides encountering goons, you'll encounter and beat the life out of wide variety of enemies including, but not limited to tigers, crab under a rice bowl, river kappas, gameras, Surprise Fish and so on. Animated Buddha statue too!
  • Impossamole. Any object or animal can be a God-damned Bat or Demonic Spider. Even innocent little penguins. And origami birds. And rolling barrels. And ceiling tiles even after they've fallen.
  • The extremely Nintendo Hard Bubsy The Bobcat games, as demonstrated in this Let's Play.
  • The Tiny Toon Adventures NES game should qualify for this. During the game, Buster and his companions repeatedly get killed by rats, crabs, fish, pirates, hedgehogs, owls, squirrels, bees, dogs, cats, Sweetie Bird (isn't she supposed to be one of the good guys?!), slime, pails, footballs, eyeballs, pens, coins, and of course, Goddamned Bats.
  • In Pizza Pop, everything, including cats, dogs, construction workers, ghosts and jack 'o lanterns are trying to kill the pizza deliverer.
  • Terramex contains, among others: acid rain, dragons, snakes that pop up from the very rocks... and your character is a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
  • All Kid Niki games, especially the third one which had flying banana peels, flowers which shoot at you, statues shaking their private parts at you, hairy plant legs and so on.
  • Back to The Future II and III. Enemies include giant snails, fish, mutant frogs, birds, bouncing balls, dinosaurs, bullet-shooting clouds, pipe monsters, ghosts, walking trashcans and in certain areas, books, test tubes, teddy bears, heart symbols, graduation hats and screwdrivers. The list goes on.
  • The NES Hook game has obviously pirates. However, besides these, you also have Giant Spiders, Bedsheet Ghosts, levitating yogas, bees, giant acorns, penguins, dragons, innocent-looking fish, dynamite sticks on balloons, boulders out of nowhere and parrots for whatever reason.
  • The SNES Home Improvement game had pretty interesting things attacking you ranging from ants and dinosaurs to mechs.
  • In Donkey Kong Country Returns, the Minecart Madness levels are bad enough, and the Rocket Ride levels crank this right on Up to Eleven.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street video game had some strange enemies attacking you. When you're in the dreamworld, getting attacked by skeletons and spiders with a human head is justified. However, it doesn't explain why in non-dream world Giant Spiders, Giant Rats, rocks falling from the sky, bats (some of which drop stones), snakes, Frankenstein monsters and jutting spikes are after you.
  • This Let's Play video of freeware game Syobon Action does a good job explicating this trope. On stage 2, the player is killed by an "invisible cloud". He was underground at the time.
    • Word to the wise: Don't trust anything in this game, from the floor to the ceiling to message boxes to bonus items to clouds in the background!
  • Anything in Mitsume Gatooru, be it birds, snakes, bats, pillar statues, rocks and more.
  • In the original Blues Brothers film, many things were after the protagonists. However, in its NES game, there were also alligators, spikes, spikeballs, mutant slugs, giant spiders and much more.
  • Earnest Evans has the protagonist fighting windworms, skeletons flailing their pickaxes, ribcages, dagger-throwing scorpions, bats, spiders, things that are hard to identify, lava with fireballs and so on. And that's just normal enemies.
  • In Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde NES game, almost everyone in the town is after doctor Jekyll. Ladies charge at him, kids shoot their slingshots at him, the whole wildlife hates him, guys in top hats drop live bombs next to him, gravedigger dishes dirt at him, singers drop notes at him and so on. Night stages are also have strange monsters attacking Mr Hyde.
  • VVVVVV. Generally speaking, if it's not a wall, it'll probably kill you. (Fortunately you get plenty of checkpoints.)
  • Zool. Due to most of the levels being a Wackyland of some sort, many of the enemies you face are just weird. Examples include jelly, musical instruments, furit and vegetables, carpenter tools, toys, carnival food, and desert plants.
  • In Dustforce, the dirt has turned many things against janitors like residents of the area, books, trash cans, wildlife and other things.
  • The indie game Limbo is this in spades. The worst part about it is you are an ordinary boy. You can run, jump, and push things, but you have no weapons, and no way to defend yourself from an insanely hostile environment that seems to exist solely to kill you. And kill you it does.
  • Athena has a wide variety of invariably hostile monsters, typically humanoids wielding some sort of weapon.


Real Time Strategy

  • In Perimeter, the nature of psychospheres means that the reality itself is trying to kill you. Psychospheres react to human presence, and forming human fears into reality...and those things then attack humans. Earth was going to be destroyed and humans want to survive, so they need to travel through psychosperes to a new world. The only way to reduce Scourge threats are to keep mental activity in the Frames at minimum, achievable by personality elimination.
  • Outpost 2 could be like this at times. Earthquakes? Check. Volcanoes? Check. Lightning storms? Check. Tornadoes? Check. Meteors? Check. Nuclear reactors that explode if left unattended? Check. All-consuming microbes released by science Gone Horribly Wrong trying to terraform the entire planet and you along with it? Check. And all this is before factoring in the other players...
  • In obscenely hard, Guide Dang It-ridden Amiga space strategy sim Exodus 3010, you're in command of the Starlight, the one mothership containing the entire human race, cryogenically frozen. If you cause the game to somehow become Unwinnable, this ship will self-destruct and kill the entire human race. This is very easy to accomplish.
    • If you run out of fighter ships.
    • If you run out of materials to build one.
    • You start with exactly the correct amount of resources to build ONE ship. It is possible, as your very first action, to waste these starting resources to build a useful-sounding 'Energy Changer'. You get no warning that building this cause you to run out of resources. The Starlight simply self-destructs.
    • Attempting to repair the ship's engine with nuclear or explosive items heavily damages the ship. You are not told which of your many inventory items repair which parts of the ship (you're supposed to guess!).
    • Most aliens, robots and space blobs you encounter are hostile. Many will become highly aggressive and attack the Starlight simply for contacting them. The game will not progress until you attempt contact with them, which guarantees them the first strike.
    • Your fighters are made of paper, more or less. Crashing into any spaceborne object results in the instant destruction of your craft.
    • To progress, you have to recover items surrounded by very sensitive space-mines. Early levels have dozens of mines in concentric circles around the loot. Later levels have many more circles of moving mines in three dimensions. Triggering the mines sets off a chain reaction that destroys your craft, the loot and all other nearby craft.
    • Your ship's tractor beam holds items above the rear of your craft while in use. If the item is below and in front of you when you activate it, the item is pulled directly through your craft, destroying it.
    • The fighter AI 'RETURN' command causes all your ships to return to the mothership simultaneously. If you have more than one ship deployed at once, it is more than likely that they will crash into each other while attempting to return.
    • A late encounter has the Starlight threatened by a meteor shower. A game bug prevents the player from averting a near-fatal collision. You simply have to endure it.
    • A phenomenon called 'Null K Space' can cause your fighters to inexplicably freeze in space. If you don't find the source of the Null K Space fast, all of your craft become frozen. As you can't return to the Starlight until all your craft are returned or destroyed, you have to reset the game.


Roguelike

  • Nethack and many other Roguelikes. Virtually anything in Nethack, animate or not, can either kill you outright or lead to your grisly death. Sinks and fountains can spew Goddamned Bats, some magic items can strangle you when equipped, you can fall into a poison-spike pit with no warning, old food can rot and give you food poisoning, etc. Also, all the initially peaceful NPCs can become hostile.
    • Alphaman has various typically-tame woodland critters as enemies and children's cartoon characters as major bosses. (Gumby will kick your ass.)
    • And then there's Slash'EM, a Nethack variant that's even more deadly and unforgiving. One of the better examples from Slash'EM is the poison cloak. Nethack players are used to dealing with deadly items already, so they know to look out for stuff like stumbling boots and amulets of strangulation. There's not a single dangerous cloak in regular Nethack, and it has a 1/3 chance of instant death. And it does so even if it's not cursed, meaning you can't look out for a cursed one. You're not gonna see it coming.
  • Dwarf Fortress: Everything, from the world-roaming dragon to the local carp, is out to rip your dwarves' lungs out. Depending upon degree of personal sadism, this may also include the player.
    • And while carp are by far the most dangerous (especially when zombified), giant eagles, unicorns, and, in previous versions, elephants are all cold-blooded dwarf-killing monstrosities.


Role-Playing Game

  • The original Shin Megami Tensei games will makes you paranoid, because not only are demons of all stripes trying to kill you, most humans are split into one of two factions, and even joining one or the other will not guarantee that members of your own faction won't still try to kill you. In fact, if you elect to pick the Neutral path in most games, you just wind up pissing off EVERYONE.
  • In Drakkhen, an old Amiga game, sometimes the stars would randomly turn into crazy monsters which would fly down and kill you very quickly.
  • In the original Neverwinter Nights, the way the faction system was set up some modules created with the toolset would have everything in an area turn hostile as soon as you attack one thing.
  • In the SNES RPG EarthBound, all manner of unlikely enemies are out to kill the party, in keeping with the absurd tone of the game. These include dogs, crows, mice, bears, cups of hot coffee, robots, trees that explode, fire hydrants, abstract art, trash cans, dinosaurs, oversized single-celled organisms, and the infamous New Age Retro Hippie.
    • The game sort of jokes about this: there's an NPC who claims she got badly wounded by a mouse. It's a legit warning: Rowdy Mice have a high chance of dealing SMAAAASH!! attacks.
    • Cavemen, street signs, seedlings, little UFOs, mushrooms, zombies, and even a circus tent want to crush you.
    • Also Features killer puddles of puke, gas pumps, mysterious tomato-looking things, drunk guys, old ladies, caterpillars, hieroglyphs, moles, nooses...
    • And this is just one game, the others include MORE exploding trees, ghost amour, potato bugs, walking bushes, a doll, a LAMP, giant robots, more mushrooms, more zombies, men's room signs, and to top it off, a walking statue with an obscene amount of HP.
  • Pokémon, not referring to the various monsters, but rather the trainers who use them. While you're walking along, expect to be interrupted and thrust into battle with Engineers, Guitarists, Teachers, Burglars (who aren't trying to mug you), Scientists, Cosplayers, and more. Much, much more.
  • The 16-bit game The Immortal had many, many ways to kill you, all of them creatively animated, sudden and well-hidden (some can be viewed here). The most pathetic? Approaching a down ladder from the wrong side.
  • Adventure Quest, the online Flash RPG, has odd monsters like giant Salt Shakers, Doom Cola Machines, and Candy Golems. Speaking of, the horror that is the Am-Bush. It is a bush. That ambushes you. Nobody seems to be entirely clear on why.
  • Final Fantasy XII features a couple of dungeons where the save crystal is not actually a save crystal. It's a monster you have to defeat before the real crystal appears. For further fun, the one in one of the bonus dungeons is resistant to just about everything, and spams high-level black magic onto your party.
    • It also averts the trope: Nearly every level has at least one resident type of monster who will not try and kill you. Granted, this changes if you attack them first, but otherwise, they're harmless. Yes, Virginia, even some of the bonus dungeons.
  • Persona 3 and Persona 4 have enemies that are called Shadows. While that sounds reasonable, take into account that their appearances include tables, gloves, scales, castles, and even one boss that is a giant heart. The sad part is that these enemies are actually threats and can easily kill you if you are not prepared.
    • A lot of these enemies are based on Tarot imagery, but yes, it's a bit disconcerting to realize that you just got the Game Over screen losing to some tables...
    • Let's also take into account the 'shadows' (demons) of Persona 2. In Persona 2, you could talk to them to get them not to rip your guts out. Now they just right out attack you.
  • Dragon Quest VIII features enemies like living handbells, bags of money, and, in the game's penultimate boss fight, a homicidal, sentient castle.
    • Dragon Quest VII had it even worse, with the aforementioned bags of money (a staple monster for the series), a giant rose bush, books, pots, wells, eggplants, anteaters, columns, clowns, a moose, clouds, Aladdin-style lamps, Easter Island heads, starfish, snails, penguins, and wine bottles.
    • Solar systems. Every Dragon Quest game featured some bizarre enemies, it seems. Dragon Quest II had robots, in a medieval fantasy. Dragon Quest III had jewel bags, carnivorous treasure chests, and evil mushrooms. Dragon Quest VI had evil mirrors, castles, and waves.
  • Similar to the Dragon Quest VIII example, one of the bosses in the second Xenosaga game is called Cathedral. It is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Similar to those two examples above, Hell House from Final Fantasy VII. It's a small house... that sprouts a head, arms and legs and tries to crush Cloud and co. Oh, and it fires out nukes as an attack.
  • So many RPGs employ the use of deadly walls as bosses that they may deserve their own subtrope. These come in the "passive" variety, which will stay put as they try to kill you (Final Fantasy VII), and the "aggressive" variety, that advance either on a timer or over a set number of turns and crush the party for an instant game over (Secret of Mana) or an instant kill (Final Fantasy IV). Or the kind that advances to crush you on a timer AND attacking regularly (Final Fantasy XII).
  • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has the killer soda creature called the Chuckolator, which is exactly what it sounds like. It has a shield and sword, and is healed by bad jokes. There's also a yo-yo wielding Hammer Bro species.
    • Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time has the Piranha Planets, which are killer planets with astronaut piranha plants. And the Handfakes, killer hands made of tar holding pictures of an enemies that they attack Mario and Luigi with.
    • Super Mario RPG has a wedding cake as a boss at one point. You fight the chefs that made the cake and they flee when the cake comes to life. The cake's signature attack is Standstorm, which attacks the whole party and causes Fear, cutting your defense in half. The hard part was you can't kill it traditionally at first. You have to "blow" out the candles by attacking and it relights one candle when its turn comes up. Only after you get rid of the top layers that you can attack the bottom layer normally and when you do beat it, Booster comes in and swallows the cake whole. Mario and his crew then just move on as if nothing happened...
  • In Mass Effect, the krogan homeworld Tuchanka IS this trope incarnate. The main reason the krogan were so dangerous was that anything the universe could throw at them paled in comparison to what was waiting to kill them in their sock drawer every morning. The Codex notes with a bit of amusement that it took the invention of gunpowder to make the krogan marginally more dangerous than the surrounding species thus making death by gunshot slightly more common than being eaten by wild animal.
    • Just to put some numbers on this, the Genophage was a bioweapon released on the krogan which renders all but one in a thousand pregnancies non-viable. The net effect of this is to reduce krogan population growth to "pre-industrial levels". To translate: Tuchanka was so dangerous that 99.9% of krogan died before they could reproduce.
    • On a somewhat less extreme note, the quarian race has... odd immune systems. In that, any foreign organism can and usually does trigger an allergic reaction that has the potential to be severe enough to be fatal. They have to wear pressurized suits at all times because on any given planet, space station, or ship, the act of breathing can get them killed.
      • Quarians immune systems are so weak that - in case of war - they just bomb the shit out of everything from orbit. Quarian infantry is very well trained but extremely vulnerable, as a single suit breach (while not immediatly fatal, the suit can self repair and floods the users system with antibiotics) can severly hamper the ability of the marine to fight on.
  • 95% of the living things in Fallout 3 try to kill you, and then there's radiation, booby traps, mad robots, landmines...
  • Fallout: New Vegas is no different.
    • And then there's Dead Money, the first game expansion. Even the air you breathe is trying to kill you.
  • In Wasteland, there are cacti. They will poke you. For actual damage.
  • In The Elder Scrolls Four, be prepared when entering the gates to Oblivion, everything that moves will persistently try to kill you. This is quite literal, since even some of the plants are hostile.
    • In its sequel, it's possible to commit suicide by walking into a hanging pan the wrong way.
  • Final Fantasy XIII: Gran Pulse is like some sort of hilariously over-the-top fantasy video game version of Australia, only with behemoths and adamantoises instead of sharks and killer spiders. Made about a million times funnier by the two Pulsian cast members having Australian accents in the English version of the game.
  • Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is pretty reasonable with most of you enemies, but what did God have in mind when he created turret-like plants on Felucia that shoot spores at you like lasers and hurt you exactly as bad? How does this thing even function? Are its roots in a radius in the earth to report beings near it, so it can shoot them? Then, why does it shoot them, not eat them? And how does it shoot only the player human character, when there are like 20 Stormtroopers and Felucians even nearer at the plant?
  • This is pretty much the premise of the RPG Maker game hfygs. Talk to the chicken? You inexplicably turn into another character and get skewered by the "anti-transformation chicken". Look at the letterbox? You send a letter bomb to God, who immediately smites you to death. Talk to the kindly old man? He devours you. And to top it all off, the final boss is The Almight Charset.
  • In the Final Dungeon in Ultima III, you can be attacked by the grass outside or the floors inside.
  • While trekking across the desert in Secret of Evermore, the player will be actively pursued by tumbleweeds trying to do him harm.

Shoot'Em Up

  • The very premise of obscure NES shooter Gun Nac is that normally docile animals and even inanimate objects mysteriously come alive and start attacking... everything! Of course, it's up to our hero to find the cause of this madness.
  • Geometry Wars is pretty much this trope, to the point where the only things NOT trying to kill you are the walls, and (ironically enough) the mines left by the spiked mine-layers. Which do kill you if you make contact with them.
  • Smash TV, so many things trying to kill you: Hoards of Bat-wielding thugs, shrapnel exploding bots, land mines, laser orbs, tanks, snake men just to name a few. Good luck, you'll need it.


Sports Game

  • 720 Degrees: Police on scooters, bodybuilders, lugers, breakdancers, frisbee throwers, recumbent bikers, cars, other skateboarders, and rollerblading skeletons are all out to slow you down and inhibit your escape from the killer bees that appear when the timer runs out.


Survival Horror

  • In Silent Hill 1, Harry must get a dagger off the door of a fridge. Simple, right? Not quite. If you don't use an item called "Ring of Contract" on the door and try to walk away from the fridge, a cutscene kicks in, which shows a huge tentacle that grabs onto Harry's leg and drags him off into the abyss.
  • The SNES horror game Clock Tower. If you look in the mirror in the bedroom your reflection might suddenly reach out and strangle you.
    • If you release the parrot from its cage (also in the bedroom) it will fly around the room screeching "I'LL KILL YOU!" and repeatedly swoop down to claw at your face.
    • Unlike many games on this list, in Clock Tower the heroine has the following survival skills to mitigate these dangers: Panic, Run Away, and Hide inside things ( And if you're lucky, there won't be something inside those things that is also trying to kill you.)
  • In Alan Wake, ninety percent of the locals will try and kill you. Tame enough -but also, darkness-possessed items ranging from crates, giant cable spools, tires and barrels will animate and fling themselves at you repeatedly. Oh, and vehicles will become possessed and try and run you over or otherwise murder you. Trees will suddenly snap and fall, bridges will collapse, flocks of angry crows will attack, boats and train cars will drop out of the sky to crush you... And sometimes not even the ground is safe, being littered with bear traps and puddles of evil black goo. Yeah, this game loves this trope.


Tabletop Games

  • Dungeons & Dragons was all over this trope like chaotic evil jam on toast that hungers for your brains. The old Monster Manuals are full of seemingly innocuous objects that are actually monsters waiting to eat you. Examples include the Roper (a stalagmite that sprouts a mouth and tentacles), the Piercer (a stalactite that falls on you in an attempt to stab you), the Cloaker (looks like an old cloak but is actually a levitating manta-ray-like thing), along with its undead equivalent the Sheet Ghoul, the Mimic (can look like any innocuous object but canonically resembles a treasure chest), the Green Slime (an corrosive amoeboid mass that looks like typical dungeon muck), the Crystal Ooze (a corrosive amoeboid blob that lurks invisibly in pools of water), the Shrieker (a giant mushroom that screams when you approach it; it isn't trying to kill you but the curious monsters investigating the screaming might), the Bowler (sentient mobile boulder) the Galeb Duhr (sentient spellcasting boulder with legs), not to mention the three different monsters (Caryatid Column, Gargoyle, and Stone Golem) that can all be summed up as "stone statue that comes to life and tries to kill you."
    • And let's not forget the Doomy Room Of Doom: the Lurker (looks like a cave ceiling), the Trapper (looks like a cave floor), the Stunjelly (looks like the wall), and the Gelatinous Cube (perfectly square transparent ooze, so the space inside the room can kill you!)'
      • And the Greater Mimic, which can imitate larger objects, like a room. The Lurker, Trapper, and Stunjelly in one.
      • And the great and mighty House Hunter Mimic, which is a house that reproduces by budding, with its offspring being sheds, outhouses, and of course, Dread Gazeboes.
    • Later editions seem to have moved away from this trope, but most of the old monsters have become icons of the game, and continue to be reprinted from one edition to the next. Furthermore, in Third Edition D&D, there are rules for animated objects as monsters, allowing for dungeon masters to easily turn anything within line-of-sight into something that will try to kill you. Furthermore, players noted housecats could easily kill a 1st level commoner in a single turn.
    • The latest edition has made a decidedly strong return to this trope. While 4th edition removes nearly every outstanding environmental hazard from the previous editions (Hell no longer tries to kill you just from you being in the environment for example), now, quite literally, every single creature you meet may attempt to destroy you. There's no such thing as a truly "Good-aligned" creature anymore, (or there is, but alignment in 4th doesn't actually mean much of anything): angels, devils, humanoids, dragons (all shapes, sizes and colors), living, unliving, fluffy bunnies, very small rocks, literally anything that can have stats can, and most likely wants to, murder you.
    • The Spoony One tells of a D&D adventure in a world based on Alice in Wonderland - where everything and everyone tries to kill you almost instantly, from the Cheshire Cat to the Caterpillar. Hell, even the Dormouse is a 20th level ninja monk
  • In the RPG Paranoia, there are countless ways to die. Whatever your mission is might kill you. Your teammates might peg you as a traitor and kill you. You might kill your teammates as traitors and have your death ordered by the Computer for murder. Malfunctioning equipment or the wrong paperwork might kill you. Ending up in a section of Alpha Complex with the wrong color-coding can kill you. There's a reason every player gets 6 backup clones.
    • The second rule listed for the gamemaster: "Kill the bastards."
  • This trope is more or less the 'twist' that makes the board game Robo Rally so exciting. The players not only have to make sure their robots stay out of lasers, crushers, and random pitfalls, they also have to avoid the other robots (who indecently have the possibility of gaining extra powers).
  • City Jumper is more "everything just stands there and you will die if you touch them" than "everything grows legs and kills you". You can die of trees, crabs, and even clouds.
  • FATAL. There's a coin that will decapitate you if it lands on heads. Your armor has a very good chance of making you more vulnerable (and a 7% chance of killing you outright).
  • This is essentially the entire premise of the Magic: The Gathering world Zendikar. Everything on the world is trying to kill you. Every building is trapped. Every animal is carnivorous and very hungry. Even the ground is made of magical elementals that will arise and attack you at a moment's notice.
    • Oh, and those giant pointy rocks hanging in the sky? Well...you may want to wander over to the Eldritch Abomination page. Open the folders and search for the word "Eldrazi".
  • A well-protected facility can be like this in Shadowrun, but Australia in the sixth world really takes the cake. The native wildlife have now gained magic abilities, creating such wonders as vampire koalas, giant wombats and bunyips. Australia is notable for having a ridiculously high concentration of angry spirits and manastorms (basically magic going amok). It seems that magic itself is out to get you in Australia.
  • New Horizon. Well, okay, it's more accurate to say almost everything is trying to kill you, and quite a few of those things are really freaking good at it. Tellingly, almost every major city has tall, thick walls...
  • Warhammer 40,000 is an example where everything in the setting is trying to kill each other.
  • If you're a Promethean, your very existence pisses off reality. No, seriously - the universe quite literally hates Prometheans, and makes it impossible for them to live peacefully. Spend more than a few minutes around humans? Good chance they'll try to kill you. Try to pet a dog? It tries to take your hand off. That odd-shaped rock? Good chance it's actually the results of your kind's generative act gone wrong, forced into dormancy and waiting to be awakened by your presence, and the only way it can survive is by eating your viscera. Stay in one place more than a day? The land itself wants you dead. Hang around your own species? Some of them are okay, but others have decided that this whole "Pilgrimage" business is a waste of time, and they like the powers being a horrid excuse for a living being can bring, and they can gain more power by doing unspeakable things to you. The entire world and everything in it is out for the fluid that passes for blood in your veins. There's a way out. Good luck.


Third-Person Shooter

  • The Crusader games, being set in a dystopic future run by a Mega Corp so obsessed with profit their attitude towards things like worker safety makes China's human rights record look like they give dissenters pats on the backs for being good chaps, has a some less ridiculous variants of this. However, as the game progresses, the nearly-invisible traps, sensors, and hidden weapons of moderate destruction get so cramped you'll be surprised they have room for their immoral experiments. And then there's the vending machines that randomly dispense grenades instead of soda.
    • It's not uncommon in certain parts of the game for random scientists to walk into a trap and blow themselves up the moment you enter the screen, often before they could even possibly be aware of your existence.
  • Sera from Gears of War is one inhospitable place. Not only is there an invading army of monsters from below, but there's also the lethal Imulsion, the Kryll, who will kill you if you so much as step in darkness, and Razorhail which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
    • It's actually been speculated that this is due to Sera's messed up ecosystem after the COG implemented its scorched earth policy.
  • Dead Space in any of its incarnations. Evil undead aliens? Check. Killer spaceship design? Check. Insane survivors? Par for the course. Traitor in your team? But of course. Giant meteors pummeling the ship? Hell yes. No wonder the death toll is so high.


Video Games based on The Bible

  • Bible Adventures has 3 separate games but each with their own assassins.
    • In Noah's Ark, rocks appear randomly and the some animals you have to pick up, tries to fight back until you manage to lift them over your head.
    • In Baby Moses, you have giant spiders, birds and men throwing bricks at you.
    • In David and Goliath, scorpions and squirrels throwing oversized acorns at you make an appearance.
  • Bible Buffet: the food is trying to kill you. Walking vegetables, eggs that blow themselves up, snowmen, ice creams, french fries and your other average food stuff. Plus test tubes and kitchenware.
  • Super 3D Noah's Ark, it's animals who are after you. Mostly goats.
  • Sunday Funday has old women, bullies who change skin color when hit, plumbers, something throwing stuff out of window and sewer holes, walking fire hydrants, sewer frogs and so on.
  • In Konami's Noah's Ark, entire wildlife except the selected 7 animals whom you must rescue, don't greet you well. The animals include giant snails, spiders, giant frogs, penguins, fish, jellyfish, birds, scorpions, giant Asteroids Monster lizards, kangaroos, ostriches and dolphins. A lot of them can shoot projectiles at you.
    • Other enemies are weirder like water plugs, deadly ice cubes, flying tigers, squares that fall from the sky, volcanic debris and mummies. Some hazards too like spikeballs and cacti that is deadly on touch.
    • There are also indigenous people like Native Americans, Romans, Aborigines, Inuits (who are surprisingly on Antarctica), Incas and Japanese. Some who use magic against you.
    • As for the bosses, the stage end boss is a water plug. For chapter bosses, in order, there is a giant sea bass, giant spider hanging from the sky, a South American-styled sun god symbol, giant lobster, killer snowman, giant hornet and satan.


Visual Novel

  • In Kagetsu Tohya, the sort-of sequel to Tsukihime, you can get eaten by a magical leopard that springs out of Arcueid's underwear drawer and lectures you. Even Shiki is baffled and unbelieving of this one. There are random bizarre deaths like this strewn all over.


Wide Open Sandbox

  • Due to a glitch in Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Tommy would sometimes take damage by walking off an ordinary street curb- apparently the mechanism that causes him to be damaged by falls sometimes misjudges the height of the curb, triggering a hit. Fans called this "stubbed toe damage". Getting a steroid power up causes a sort of Bullet Time that enhances Tommy's speed, dramatically increasing the damage this causes, meaning Tommy can get killed by running over a street curb.
    • Similarly, there's a couple of cheats for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas where C.J. can jump really, really high, but the cheat does nothing for his ability to land. So basically you can jump two stories, but unless there's something a story high for you to land on, you're going to take damage when you land. Further, the cheat is only useful at all in the suburban areas or country towns. out in the country or parks, there's nothing to land on but the ground. In the city, everything's too high. So you can't jump on anything and you hurt when you land.
  • In The Godfather: The Game, it's possible to anger the police into going after you and at just over two out of five Vendetta "boxes" filled, enemy gangsters of the relevant Family will open fire as you get near enough, whether in a car or on foot. If you're spectacularly bloodthirsty, masochistic or unfortunate, you can be fired on by all four enemy Families and the police, making it very difficult to get anywhere. Combined with your character's near-realistic squishiness and you get this trope.
  • STALKER is set in a nuclear wasteland where you never more the one hundred metres from a killer human, mutant, patch of radioactivity or anomaly that with decorate the countryside with your entrails. Its also one of the few First Person Shooters where you can die of starvation.
  • Spore and Galactic Adventures, while at first glance isn't capable of this, is actually designed to embody this trope if the creator so wishes. Oh look at those cute and cuddly looking monkey things by that nest ove-NOOO!! They're everywhere!
    • Adventures will really jack this one up simply because you can take advantage of all the creators to create some very dangerous enemies and obstacles. Soldiers, space marines, angry tribe members, exploding trees, very explosive fuel storage containers, killer whoopie cushions, Clark & Stanley, space ships that look like gnomes, and whatever else you used to "create the universe"...


Non-video game examples

Live Action TV

Web Comics


Web Original

  • Felarya. A land mostly inhabited by Cute Monster Girls who tend to see human visitors as tasty snacks. Apart from giant sentient predators, said visitors may also be devoured by animals, carnivorous plants, or even gaping mouths in the ground. Or shredded by sharp leaves falling from a tree. Or... The possibilities are many.
  • The Binder of Shame describes Psycho Dave's gameworld thus:

And for the record the most dark and brutal game world I had ever seen was a D&D campaign that Psycho Dave had run many years ago. For this game he had created a hybrid damage system that combined the standard D&D hit point system with the Arduin Grimoire critical hit chart and the infamous Rolemaster critical damage tables. And he used this table for any kind of injury whatsoever for players and NPCs alike. In doing so he created a desolate, blood soaked ruin of a world where carpenters died from complications of bruising their thumbs, people picking at hangnails had their flesh suddenly fall away from their bones in wet red strips and mothers in childbirth frequently detonated.

  • The world of Remnant from RWBY is home to the distinctly unnatural creatures known as the Grimm, which seem to exist solely to attack and destroy humanity and its works. And as we find out at the end of V3, this is very literally the case, as they are the creations and minions of a Humanoid Abomination named "Salem", who is actively trying to exterminate humanity.


Western Animation

  • The original My Little Pony series was filled with vile villains, misplaced magical artifacts, and deadly wildlife.
    • Mind you, Friendship is Magic isn't slouching around in this department either; the Everfree Forest is filled with near Australia grade deadly wildlife and plants.
  • Futurama loves this trope, what with being set in a Crapsaccharine future and all. "Ghost in the Machines" takes this to the logical extreme, with Bender possessing nearly every appliance that Fry interacts with.

Fry: I was attacked in my bathroom, by my bathroom!


Real Life -- Australia

  • Yes, Australia has so much dangerous stuff we had to give it its own section. This quote is quite typical of most people's opinions on the place.

"Every creature [in Australia] is bigger and angrier than anywhere else in the world. ...spiders and snakes and the like normally hide under rocks. The Earth is one big rock, Australia is at the bottom of the big rock, and so they're trying to hide under it."

—Karl Pilkington - Happyslapped by a Jellyfish.
  • Even the geological chemistry of Oz is trying to kill you. Proof. Midnight Oil sang about the workers who had to suffer for it.
  • About the only things that aren't dangerous or poisonous are some of the sheep (which aren't native to Australia). And maybe wallabies. The following things will kill you: common spiders, the most common snakes, ticks, crocodiles, sharks, jellyfish, stonefish, we have a seashell that will go for you and deliver a very painful, fast death. Even (male) platypus are poisonous.
    • Platypodes aren't merely venomous, they have probably the most terrifying venom in nature. The other animals on this list will just kill you, the Platypus isn't that humane. Its venom attacks the victim's pain receptors, cranking them Up to Eleven and ripping off the knob. It causes pain so horrible that even the highest non-lethal dose of morphine isn't enough. To stop the pain, doctors actually have to physically sever the nerve from the affected area to the brain because that's the only thing powerful enough.
    • Except that, if a spider spins a web (as in a traditional, picturebook cobweb), it won't kill you normally, just make you wish it had.
    • A wallaby could still probably break a few of your ribs by kicking you, and that's pretty bad as broken ribs can lead to punctured lungs or a punctured heart.
  • Then there's the most humiliating thing of all - mauled by Wombat. No joke.
  • And then there is the kangaroo, which is quite capable of disemboweling a person with its back feet. Breaking the old stereotype that island faunas are wimpy, kangaroos have proven themselves quite able to compete with other animals on the mainland. So don't diss the 'roo, mate!
  • The Australian fierce snake (named for its home, the Fierce Desert, not for its temperament, which is actually non aggressive) is considered the most poisonous snake in the world.
  • According to the Made of Explodium page, eucalyptus trees have a rather amusing tendency to, well, explode, given the proper stressors. Truly a gamer's continent.
    • Eucalypts also produce dry, waxy leaves and loose bark that fuel the frequent and highly dangerous bushfires, and have a tendency to lose branches in high winds, or just after said fires. Add in the fact that eucalypt branches are often 1–2 metres in length, and all grow from the top foot or so of trunk, and you can see that even the trees are trying to kill you.
  • Also, falling gum tree limbs (known as widowmakers) have caused serious property damage and deaths. And they fall with no warning. Feel like taking a nap under a gum tree during a hot day? It might be the last thing you do...
  • And that's just the stuff on land, they also have - apart from the sharks and saltwater crocodiles - blue ringed octopus, box jellyfish, cone snails, stingrays, etc.
    • You know your country is scary when even the snails can kill. The aptly named Triton (not the car) is one of the few predators that will kill and eat "crown of thorns" starfish
  • That is one of the reasons why Steve Irwin was considered one of the best Real Life badasses. "Now watch as I approach the kangaroo's babies, if I'm not careful the mama will rip off my arm and start beating me with it!!" Nothing he says is worth anything less then two exclamation points.
    • If Australia killed Steve Irwin, what chance do you have?
  • Emus are basically really big Velociraptor with a beak. Be glad that you do not meet their dietary needs. Cassowaries, too. They were actually used as the models for the Velociraptor in Jurassic Park.
    • Adding to the horror - a Cassowary is basically an emu with warpaint and an axe attached to its head.
  • If you think that's bad, Australia was even more of a Death World back in the Pleistocene, when humans first arrived. Carnivorous buzz-saw toothed kangaroos? Check. Monitor-lizards the size of a city bus? Check. Climbing warm-blooded saw-toothed crocodiles? Check. Gigantic killer pseudo-python? Check. Marsupial lion with sickle thumbs? Check. The Demon Duck of Doom! (I'm not joking, scientists actually call it that). Oh yeah, it's there. Ninjemys, a gigantic horned turtle built like a panzer tank (and yes, the name means exactly what you think it means and it was named after that), check.
  • This Cracked article feels appropriate. No, it isn't all in Australia, but half of it is.
  • Any child growing up in Australia learns (unless the parents are trying to kill the kid) a long list of things that can kill you, practically by heart. It's a long list, and just to make sure at least one state teaches it in primary schools.
    • Is it "everything"? That's not that hard to memorize.
  • Koalas. If you try to hug a wild one, they will be happy to "hug" you back with razor sharp claws that are designed to be habitats for nasty shit, making them natural experts of biological warfare. Have you ever heard one growl at you? The cute little bears marsupials sound like giant ogres!
    • On top of that, most of them have chlamydia, so, in a way, they kill your future children, too.
  • Out of all these critters, the only ones that really cramp your style are the jellyfish. Sharks? Pfft, there's like three left. Spiders? Don't go picking up random bits of rusty iron. Snakes? Make a lot of noise whilst walking through undergrowth, wear tough shoes, etc. Stonefish/cone shells? Don't walk barefoot on reefs. Drop bears? Don't hang around underneath gum trees. But jellyfish? "Oh, I'm sorry if you wanted to go for a swim at that otherwise harmless sandy beach when it's 42 degrees. We'll just be floating around by our thousands, invisible and potentially fatal."
    • Not to mention the Irukandji. The worst of the box jellyfish (an infamous class of jellyfish), they will actively seek out prey rather than drift along in the current, are the size of a fingernail, are transparent, can swim through anti-jellyfish safety nets on beaches and pack a horrifically painful sting which has 'a sense of impending doom' listed as a symptom on That Other Wiki.
    • Sure the little guys are scary, but on the other side of the scale, Australia is also home to a southern-hemisphere relative of the Lion's Mane jellyfish. Yes, that is a jellyfish that can grow up to 120 feet long, 8 feet across, and whose stingers remain dangerous even after detached. While there hasn't really been a recorded case of a person being eaten by one of these, isn't it nice to know that there are species of jellyfish actually capable of devouring you whole? Oh yea, and sometimes they swarm. Sleep well!
  • They may not be dangerous to humans, but the only known variety of sea squirt that snares prey like a Venus fly-trap rather than passively filtering water lives just off Australia.
    • Look at the rest of the list. Not dangerous to humans? Don't count on it.
  • And because this list isn't long enough, the Blue-Ringed Octopus. This thing is so deadly that if you're bitten by it with the antidote in your hand you still may not survive. It may be the purest example of how living in Australia is a Very Bad Idea.
    • What antidote? There isn't an antidote for the blue-ringed octopus's venom. In no small part because the horrifying concoction is hard to formulate an antivenom for, being a mix of several different horrifically lethal chemical substances, tetradotoxin in primis, which causes total paralysis of everything, including involuntary muscle movement - like say, breathing. Or your heart beating. And you're conscious every second of it - assuming you are going to live much longer, which is debatable because you're paralyzed, look dead and, well... just pray your buddy (you DO have one with you, right...?) can recognize the effects of blue ringed octopus venom, otherwise say hi to a very unpleasant death!
  • And let's not forget the Great Australian Bight. For non-locals, thats a region of South Australia where the ground beneath your feet is brittle and conceals deep abysses leading to underground caverns filled with seawater, which will happily drown you if the fall doesn't splat you first. That's right: in Australia, even the ground wants to kill you.
  • Slightly more north is the Nullarbor Plain. Imagine the biggest desert you can think of. Now imagine it bigger. Now imagine red. Now add the typical Australian NT climate heat of 48-50 degrees Celsius.[1] Now imagine having gone out there looking for gold which is relatively easy to find beneath the sand. Yes, even the ground is trying to invite you over and kill you.
  • To elucidate a little further, it's not just NT ground that can kill you (although honestly, living in Alice Springs is almost a death wish, and you only live in Darwin if you have a love affair with bipolar weather and cyclones), but nearly all ground everywhere that can kill you. Apart from some of the most perilous mountain ranges anywhere (with sharp drops, deceptive rock formations, crumbling earth, nexus of underground caves which you won't find your way out of without a very experienced guide, and narrow winding paths that you only can travel with immense preparation (and these are mountain ranges with absolutely tiny mountains compared to the rest of the world, just look up the Flinder's Ranges)), you have wide vast expanses of ridiculously dry desert in Western Australia that you will die in if you don't have someone who knows how to find the water hidden deep beneath the ground, a coastline with so many abrupt cliffs that if you're not careful you can drive right off, and marsh land and estuaries in NSW and Queensland that will either suck you into their swampy extremes, or leave you wandering lost for days in sand dunes. Even the bushes will try to poison you and paralyse you! ... Oh god, why do I live here again?
  • Continuing on from even the ground trying to kill you, everyone growing up in Darwin knows not to dig during the wet season if you have any cuts or injuries. The bacteria, Melioidosis, more commonly known as Nightcliff Gardener's Disease lives deep in the soil, but comes to the surface when it rains. It's has a nearly 90% mortality rate when untreated and there's no known vaccine.
  • Even the things that aren't native are happy to join the party. Just give them a little evolving time. This article, about felines that take Cats Are Mean Up to Eleven, takes place in, you guessed it, Brisbane.
    • Yes, even things only introduced to the Australian environment 100 years ago can now kick the ass of its counterparts in Europe and America. And they tend to be more sadistic too.
    • You also have to remember that pretty much any time Cracked mentions Australia, it must, and absolutely must, be restated that dingoes eat human babies.
  • The plants can also kill you. The Stinging Tree is aptly named; all shrubs and trees of this genus have very fine hairs which will end up in your body if you walk too close (also, said hairs SHED, so too close is probably within a 5 km radius). These stingers are poisonous, and they have been known to kill horses, dogs and, yes, people. With great efficiency. Even if it doesn't kill you, the hairs - and subsequently the pain, because its the Stinging Tree for a reason, tends to last several years; the hairs are too fine to remove, and they don't break down in your body.
  • It is ironic when one considers that despite the high number of dangers Australia actually has a very low death rate from bites and stings, due to a combination of its people being well-educated about the dangers, advanced medical care being accessible to a majority of the population, and many of its potentially dangerous animals being unaggressive and/or restricted to remote areas where they rarely encounter people.
    • The stats speak for themselves. The take-home lesson - no worries.
  • In the surrounding areas of the A.C.T (Australian Capital Territory), there is a road to a lovely beach town in NSW (Batemans Bay) called the clyde. Along this road, there is a tourist attraction known as Pooh Bear's corner. Back in WWII, this fun little visiting spot (now filled with plush toys of its namesake) was filled with explosives. Back then, the Clyde was the only route in or out of Canberra and was meant to halt invading Japanese soldiers by either blowing them up or cutting off the road at an important point. So in Australia, even the most innocent of places could've killed you.
  • Australia is not just an active killer, it's also passive-aggressive as all hell. There's been no crustal overturn in most of the continent since around the time of the first dinosaurs, so the soils tend overwhelmingly to be thin and nutrient-poor, and in many places—especially in the southwest—tens of millions of years of accumulated salt spray make the ground inhospitable to vegetation not evolved to cope with it. Europeans moved to this place and set about establishing European-style agriculture. Australia blinked and chuckled grimly at that, though it's true those rabbit things are annoying.
  • Just to prove the government has a sense of humour - snakes are protected species in most areas, it's illegal to kill them. Snakes do not reciprocate this policy. Fortunately for gardeners, the natural enemy of the snake, the shovel, is often close by.
  • But, there is one subversion. Most native Australian bees either have no stingers or stingers too small to penetrate human skin. Australia has a most ironic sense of humor.


Real Life -- The Rest

  • One could argue that Real Life itself is loaded with this: wild animals, natural disasters, disasters from space, wars...And let's not get into the megadisasters on Earth: supervolcanoes, supertornadoes, megatsunamis, hypercanes, giant asteroids...the list just goes on and on and on...
  • Column writer Robert Brockway has written a book titled "Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead"
  • How about the ocean? Obviously if you can't swim and don't have a lifejacket you're in trouble. But even if you manage to find some kind of floatation device much of the ocean is cold enough to get you via hypothermia as cold water conducts heat away from the body 32-times faster than cold air - many of the victims of shipping disasters who escape the sinking ship die from the cold. Even heing adrift in warm waters in the relative security of a raft is no guarantee of safety as you are at serious risk of dying from thirst. Drinking large quantities of seawater is potentially lethal thanks to the high salinity that will lead to dehydration and kidney failure. Then there are the things that live in the oceans; large predatory animals including sharks and killer whales. Not to mention millions of lethally venomous jellyfish, sea urchins, lion fish, stone fish, octopodes, etc. Plus electric eels, catfish and rays, although the only of those you're going to find out in seawater are the electric rays, which like to swim in shallow coastal waters. Note that the electric ray genus "Torpedo" wasn't named after the naval weapon, the weapon was named after them.
    • Octopuses are rarely dangerous, in spite of their infamous reputation for malevolence. First, while almost all octopuses venomous, very few will bite humans, with those few that will will do so only when provoked (i.e., being pulled out of their lair and or picked up). Second, the giant octopuses, the only ones capable of harming a human with sheer size, usually hide in caves deeper than human beings tend to dive, and are very shy. Third, in the very rare situation that an octopus is harming you, you can usually get it to let go by pinching the incredibly sensitive membrane between the arms. Fourthly, only one species, the Blue-Ringed, is the only octopus ever been documented as being able to kill humans.
    • The Humboldt Squid, off the coast of South America. Know what it's Spanish name is? Diablo Rojo. This is a species of squid that actively attacks you and would be QUITE happy to kill you. And it can. One of them can do quite a bit of damage, even assuming it doesn't kill you and you have a buddy around to help you. You have to wear a suit of armour if you intend to go into waters anywhere people think there might POSSIBLY be one of these evil, evil fuckers.
      • The above has been shown to be more hype than fact. A documentary by researchers showed that the squid's infamous aggressive behavior is due to the traumatic situations in which they normally encounter humans (i.e. when being hooked and killed by fisherman, the blood, death and chaos understandably drives them a bit crazy). When encountered under more natural conditions they are peaceful and even curious toward human divers.
  • Electric Eels live in the Amazon River. Which brings up another point... The Rainforest. No wonder they are called Green Hells.
  • Africa. The largest collection of large predators on a single continent, poisonous snakes like the Black Mamba? Even prey animals like the Cape Buffalo will seek out and kill you! Not to mention what the humans are up to what with the constant civil wars.
    • Technically, it's only the largest surviving collection of large carnivores. Most of the world had an impressive selection during the Pleistocene.
    • It should also be noted that, when people talk about the most poisonous/dangerous animals not from Australia, chances are they're from Africa.
    • Even more among humans, there are religious extremism in the North (like Egypt) and AIDS in the Sub-Saharan regions.
  • Anyplace that's had prolonged brushfire wars is likely to qualify, even if they're long since over. Two words: land mines. Now the freakin' ground is trying to kill you!
  • Very relevant to this trope. But especially the Japanese giant hornets and Africanized bees.
  • Mexico. If it ain't the cartel, the corrupt cops, or even some enterprising thug, it's the water (yeah it's true), the rattlesnakes, the wolves, the sharks, the coyotes...ay, let's just say that Mexico ain't a very friendly place.
  • Florida could stand a mention. The natives or long-term residents love to freak out the newcomers by blandly discussing the many things that could kill you, and the 'survival skills' that make up an essential part of childhood education. (Such as The Stingray Shuffle, running Zig-Zag from gators, "Red and yellow kills a fellow. Red and black is safe for Jack"....)
    • Some of those many things: Hurricanes, Floods, Forest Fire, Tornadoes/Water Spouts, Sink Holes, Rip-Tides, Deadly Flesh-Eating Amoebas in the Hot Springs, Heat Stroke, Deadly Disease-Carrying Mosquitos, Fire Ants, Various Other Biting Insects, MANY Poisonous Spiders, Trees That Can Damage Your Skin And Blind You Just By Being Under Them When It Rains, Alligators in Every Single Body of Water No Exceptions, Sharks (sometimes in the rivers!), Snakes - Poisonous and -thanks to the exotic pet trade - Constrictors! Coyotes, Rabies Outbreaks...
      • Florida is basically the Australia of the US.
        • To be fair, any coastal state in the southeastern US contends with these, though there has yet to be any escaped constrictor snakes. To make up for this glaring lack of danger, many have mountain terrain that adds bears, wolves and cougars to the mix. It's always fun trying to explain to individuals unfamiliar with the fauna that yes, it is a good idea to keep a loaded weapon near the door when you live in secluded areas.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You is a way of life for any Explosive Breeder found in nature.
  • Some of the most dangerous volcanoes haven't erupted in a long time. Heck some of them most people don't know are volcanoes! ex. Most people thought Pompeii was just a nice big mountain, back in the old days, well it made the most deadly eruption list, TWICE! Yellowstone doesn't even look like a volcano, but it's actually a supervolcano that one day is going to erupt, and cause worldwide crop failure. People round the world wouldn't even be able see the sun for at least months. The worst part? We don't even know when it will happen.
      • So, I'm right in assuming that, if it erupts, the consequences will be so dire that people will be wishing they were in the US when the thing goes?
    • And yet, the now over 900,000 people living in Naples (and into the millions in the general Campania region) still live at the base of Vesuvius, knowing it's a violent volcano.
      • But quite possibly NOT knowing that they are on the doorstep of Campi Flegrei - a supervolcanic caldera like Yellowstone.
  • Another major one: the entire universe. Earth is the only place we know of in existence where humans can survive without serious protective gear, and even that wouldn't help on most of the planets and moons in our solar system alone.
    • Humans can't even survive on most of Earth, as 70% of it is covered by water, and of the remaining 30%, most of it is either too hot or too cold for survival without protective equipment (think about it, even in fairly moderate climates, it's easy to die of exposure to the elements if you don't have any sort of protection). And that's only the surface of the Earth.
    • And if we ever did find another life-bearing planet, even if the composition of the atmosphere, gravity, and temperature were conducive to human survival, whatever life had evolved there would almost certainly have evolved a very different biochemistry pretty much by chance, which makes the odds of literally everything living on that planet - especially the organisms we might be tempted to contemplate eating - being full of (to us) deadly toxins pretty good. (If it's any comfort, we'd probably have the same effect on them.)
  • And beyond all the nasty critters in the ocean or on land, we humans are susceptible to death from a wide assortment of microscopic organisms that happily multiply in the nice warm tissues of our bodies, or go right ahead and inject copies of themselves into our white blood cells, destroying them. And that's not even taking into account parasites, fungi, and prions that will also do a wonderful job of killing you in various creative ways.
    • Not to mention cancer, which happens when your own cells get their Berserk Button pressed and try to kill you.
  • Allergies. Sure, you might bite the dust because of a volcano or a platypus, but the world is a whole lot more fun when strawberries, milk, dust, cats, dogs, mold, chocolate, peanuts, flowers, medicines, seafood, eggs, wheat, certain scents, food dyes, and/or certain cleaning products are trying to kill you.
    • Worse, because it's your OWN immune system overreacting to these things because it literally has got nothing else to do. Yep, that's right - your own immune system is killing you out of BOREDOM!
  • Fuel-air bombs. When one goes off, it spreads a fine aerosol of fuel droplets into the air, this mixture then leaks into every crevice and confined space (incl bunkers, cavees etc). Then it is ignited into a consuming, blazing inferno. Thus the air itself kills you. (and when it fails to ignite, the fuel used can be so toxic that you die a horrible, slower death by chemical weapon instead)
  • Moab, Utah (no, it's not just the name of a really big bomb) has Splat Man, along with a shirt that reads, "Moab... it's not for wimps."
    • Also, Angel's Landing, though not in Moab, about 100 or so miles south in Zion. The National Park Service recognizes five deaths on that trail. Have fun falling 1,200 feet to your death!
  • And speaking of Utah, want some water from our largest lake? Yeah, it's four times saltier than the ocean. Located right next to a desert where the ground is made of salt. Have fun getting to California!
  • Time. If you avoid all the things listed here and never visit Australia, even if you become a Brain In a Jar or Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, something will kill you eventually. You might make it to the ultimate end of all reality if you're lucky, but even if there is no such thing and time is infinite, the nature of infinity means that if it is possible for you to die, you will eventually, no matter how unlikely.
  1. ↑ 118-122 degrees Fahrenheit
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