Unwinnable by Design

"The programmers of this game want you to fail, and when you do, they write 'Ha ha!' on the wall and they laugh about it!"

—Noah Antwiler on Dirty Harry: The NES game

There are plenty of difficult games out there, but at least most of them have the decency to kill you off the moment your quest becomes impossible to complete—otherwise you'd end up wandering around looking for a way to progress when none exist. Now, in the case of games that are Unwinnable By Mistake it's kind of understandable—either a bug or an oversight has rendered the game broken so there's no way for it to tell the player how screwed they are.

But Unwinnable by Design is a whole other kettle of fish: This time around, the designers have set down giant digital man-traps that exist purely to ensnare the unwary. The worst are those that cripple the game from the start, but let the player continue for hours before the fatal error becomes apparent.

If the whole game intentionally cannot be won, that's either an Endless Game or an Unwinnable Joke Game. Unwinnable by Design games can be won, but you can forfeit your chance of victory without realizing it.

These are especially common in Adventure Games, especially Interactive Fiction. These were originally rife with intentionally unwinnable situations, which became a tradition before waning because players still couldn't stand them.

Zarf's^[1] Cruelty Scale of Interactive Fiction, as lifted (and revised) from here, here and here, divides video game types as follows:

• Merciful: You only ever need one save file, and use that only if you want to turn the computer off and go to sleep. You never need to restore to an earlier game, because there's no way it ever becomes unwinnable.
  • Say that there is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you try to push it, the game won't let you. Instead it says something like 'You'd better not. You'd lose that nifty pocket screwdriver'.

• Polite: You only need one save game, because if you do something fatally wrong, you won't be given a chance to overwrite it.
  • There is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you push it, all your stuff gets vaporized, including your pacemaker, and you promptly suffer cardiac arrest. The game then mocks you for being stupid enough to press it.

• Tough: There are things you can do which you'll have to save before doing. But you'll think "Ah, I'd better save before I do this."
  • There is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you push it, all your stuff gets vaporized, and you can't finish the game.

• Nasty: There are things you can do which you'll have to save before doing. After you do one, you'll think "Oh, bugger, I should have saved before I did that."
  • The same as Tough, only there's no sign. You will only find out what the button does upon pressing it and noticing that your inventory is now gone.

• Cruel: There is no immediate indication that your game has become unwinnable. You think "I should have kept the save I overwrote three hours ago. Now I'll have to start over."
  • The same as Nasty, only you just hear a humming noise when you push the button, and there are two buttons beside it that do other, plot-important things. Then, a while later, you need to solve a puzzle and check your inventory... "Hey, where's all my stuff?"

Two further categories outside the list that arise on occasion:

• Evil: You think "How could I have known that was a mistake?" The unwinnable situation looks so similar to the winning path that you probably saved right after making the game Unwinnable.
  • Like Cruel, except the button that activates the inorganic vaporizer ray also opens the door that leads to the next area. You may or may not be told that the humming noise was separate from the door opening. The only way to proceed is to disable the ray by solving another puzzle before you press the button, or stash all your inorganic goods somewhere safe.

• Hell: You have to go to the walkthrough to find out where you went wrong, because you aren't even sure which room you made your mistake in.
  • Same as Evil, except the vaporizer ray's effect is time-delayed; even if you obsessively check your inventory after every action, your stuff disappears at some random point in the future with no indication that the door-opening button was responsible.

Note that dipping below "polite" is considered a design flaw by most design philosophies today. Old-fashioned adventure games, notably most Sierra games released before 1992, seldom rise above "nasty".

Make this a Guide Dang It, and you're certain to piss a lot of people off.

Note that this trope is just for games where the designers constructed an unwinnable situation on purpose. If the unwinnable situation arises as the result of a programming flaw, like a bug, or a design error such as making it possible to advance to the next stage without collecting a vital item, this is actually Unwinnable By Mistake. If the unwinnable situation arises after the player had done one or several mistakes to a point they were continuously warned against what they're doing or feel as if the player must actively seek a way to make the game unwinnable, it is Unwinnable by Insanity.

The spiritual opposite of a Hopeless Boss Fight, where you are supposed to fail to make the game continue. Also (in some cases) the worst-case scenario of Lost Forever. Contrast Endless Game, for games not supposed to be "won" at all: games that have a High Scores screen instead of a victory condition.

For cases in which you get a game over from creating an unwinnable situation, see Nonstandard Game Over. Games that wish to rub things in a bit may include a period of Controllable Helplessness. For a milder version where you are at least well aware that you're screwed, see Cycle of Hurting. For situations where the game intentionally makes you think you've lost, see Fission Mailed.

Examples of Unwinnable by Design include:

Sierra

Ah, Sierra. During the heyday of point-and-click adventure games, Sierra was one of the leading names alongside the likes of LucasArts. What truly set them apart was less their stories and quirky humor, which were rather generic in some ways, but their apparent joy in murdering their own pixellated heroes in as many ways as possible. The true enemy for the player and their avatar was less the antagonist and more the developers themselves.

Tough examples:

• At one point in King's Quest VI, Alexander is thrown into a labyrinth and has to find his way out again. This requires certain inventory items, and it's possible to enter the labyrinth without them. If you do, then you can never escape. Better yet, there's no indication of which items you need until you've already entered the maze; anybody who didn't use a guide was banking on pure luck to avoid a restart there.
  • The game is a bit merciful in this regard. If you don't have the required items when this particular point arrives, then you'll be given time "to prepare", at which point you head back, hopeful that you have everything. If you have everything you need, then you'll simply be taken directly to the labyrinth. But you only get one chance to prepare, and you are never told what preparations you need.
• In Quest for Glory II, dropping important items like the mirror and magic lamp would get you stuck later. The latter triggers a unique Easter Egg death.
  • So does dropping the spare clothes when you go to Raseir. Let's just say the Hero looks good in a veil.
• In Laura Bow 2, if you've done everything you could to outrun the murderer in Act 5, but forgot to pick up the boot before or during the chase, you've officially ran yourself into a brick wall and might as well restart because later on you will be trapped in a furnace room unable to backtrack, and you need to give the boot to Steve or else he'll step on a piece of coal and be unable to help you to move the slab hiding a secret passage to go on. This is especially annoying as said boot appears after Yvette dies, but only after you've examined her body and appears in a room you have no other reason to visit until the chase scene, in which case good luck not being freaked out enough to stop and grab it. It was so bad that some versions of the game fixed this by making the boot reappear in the furnace room beside the coal pile if you didn't grab it beforehand.
  • You'll need the wire cutters before you reach the chase scene in Act 5, because without them you won't be able to cut the wire from the fallen pterodactyl model to bar the door. The wire itself, however, is surprisingly not a case of this (despite the fact every other body besides Ziggy's is unexaminable (for good reason) during the chase scene), as you have time (even without barred doors) to snip the wire if you hadn't already to properly bar the door (although not long).
  • If you don't have at least a quarter of snake oil left before you take the smelling salts away from the Countess's body, the game will automatically move on and prevent you the chance to refill it before you eventually face a horde of snakes in the secret passage near the furnace. This is especially annoying as while it only takes three quarters of snake oil to move Barney into a position he can be subdued without biting Laura (that is, assuming you start with a full bottle), Laura will only make a comment indicating that Barney is safe to touch after you've used up your snake oil reserves on him. You can easily refill it in the preservation room if you've run out, but there is sometimes a chance where Wolfe will be there (a random chance of such which increases the more you fart around in other rooms), and if he is, he'll kick you out indefinitely and prevent you from getting said refill.
  • And just to rub it in, the final act subverts the usual Amateur Sleuth antics by making you back up your claims with evidence. What, you forgot to find that mastodon hair on the guy covered in alcohol, or cop a feel of the murdered corpse to pilfer through his pockets? Aw...
• Space Quest V had a particularly nasty scenario. At the Genetix segment you are supposed to look to find an important item. If you leave without it, the game will let you know that in bold lettering just after you beam out.^[2] If you don't pay attention, then much, much later, after having crawled through a complex and stressful series of mazes on the enemy battleship, you confront the Big Bad and realize that you're missing that very item. The Have a Nice Death message then once again tells you what you should have picked up.

Nasty examples:

• In King's Quest I, if you lose or drop any of the three treasures (for example, if the magic mirror is stolen by the dwarf), then the game is unwinnable.
  • Luckily, in AGD's remake of King's Quest 1, you can play a no-dead-ends mode.
• In King's Quest III, the game is run on an internal timer. If you aren't in the right place when an event happens, then you're stuck and the game is unwinnable. Usually, there aren't any warnings that there's a time limit for certain things, either... A notable example: after you get the amber stone from the oracle, the pirate ship in the harbor will only be there for twenty more minutes. Then it will leave, forever, taking your only chance to get to Daventry with it. Although if you're desperate, you can always try the random teleporting stone and hope you get lucky and end up there...
  • That said, you get plenty of time; and once you've finished the pirate ship segment (about two-thirds of the way through the game), the timer becomes irrelevant. (There is one more end-game sequence that's timed—but that's a matter of seconds, not minutes.)
• Screw up in making the Dispel Potion in Quest for Glory I (with items like the Magic Acorn, which can be Lost Forever), and the game is unwinnable.
  • Or if you piss off the Healer by stealing from her. At the time, you are not warned that she'll know what you've done. Did we mention that one of the "hero" classes is the thief?
• In King's Quest V, in the area near the pie section (see Cruel), you have to use your rope on an outcropping of rock to ascend it. There are two spots you can choose from. If you pick the wrong outcropping, then it will break and kill you. You cannot retrieve the rope after you've set it in place, and so the game can become unwinnable without warning.
• Conquests of the Longbow was fairly merciful; you could screw up so much that you lost the treasure you were supposed to capture or let a major NPC die, and you would still just get a Bad Ending. But on the second day, you're supposed to get a slipper from Marian, who's under attack by a Fens Monk. You can either kill the attacker, at which point she'll give you the slipper as a reward, or let her die and then take the slipper from her corpse. If she died, then you'll die the next day when you go to deliver the slipper.
• Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards is just as easy to mess up in as its sequels, but the penalties aren't as strict and the unwinnable situations are a little easier to see coming. The easiest way to make the game unwinnable is simply by running out of cash and being anywhere but right next to the casino, so you can't pay for cab fare and are basically stuck.

Cruel examples:

• Conquests of Camelot has a bad one. If you failed to rescue any of the three knights, then Arthur has sin burdening him. It might not seem so bad; but once you get the Holy Grail, you'll receive some triumphant victory music...and then you'll be suddenly shocked into dust because you didn't save Gawain, Lancelot, and Galahad and are therefore deemed unworthy.
  • Notably, Galahad asks you to let him die; Gawain says he's beyond help; and Lancelot is, well, indisposed. And they're all saved or left to die in the first half of the game. You get the Grail at the end of the game. Do the math.
• In King's Quest II, there is a bridge you must cross (several times) over the chasm, and making just one extra trip across makes the game unwinnable: it will break before you can get the three magic doors opened. This is far from clear.
  • This gets parodied (and the trope subverted) in Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist. There's a rickety bridge, and crossing it generates a message saying something like "Wow, that's pretty unstable. I probably only have three crossings left! I should use them carefully." But in fact, you have to cross it something like seven times, and if you want you can waltz across it all day long. Nothing will happen. (And yes, the warning message is generated every time, which is funny, then annoying, then funny again, and finally annoying.)
  • Also referenced in King's Quest VI, which advertises "a bridge repair kit, for when you've crossed a bridge one too many times."
  • Space Quest also has a bridge on Kerona that breaks if you cross it too many times.
• In King's Quest IV, you can fail to get certain items before night falls, or fail to get a certain item off an island that you can enter only once. If you didn't get them during the day, then you aren't going to get them during the night, and you're stuck as a result. (The magic fruit is the most obvious example, though that gives a Bad Ending rather than an unwinnable situation.) And if you didn't get it off the island the first time, then you don't get a second chance.
  • The one on the island is worth elaborating on. It's completely hidden; there's no visual cue on-screen to indicate its presence. The only way to find it is to stand in a certain spot and type a simple, but relatively non-intuitive command that has never been used before that point and will never be used again. It's also an object that one would never logically expect to find on a tiny, deserted island.
    • This particular example suffers from adventure game logic: you've had to go through a lot to get to this island, and the only visible item is something that will get you off the island safely. For no reason other than the fact that you're playing an adventure game, there must be something else on the island. That is quite literally the only reason to search for the particular, hidden item.
• King's Quest V has the infamous mountain-climbing sequence, where the player must traverse a treacherous mountain. During the journey, Graham will get hungry, requiring the player to eat and letting the player choose between eating a pie (which can be gotten, and eaten, very early in the game) or a piece of meat (which the player could possibly not have gotten at all). There's also a starving eagle the player meets later on at the mountain, who you have to feed to survive later on in the game. What the game expects you to do is eat a piece of meat yourself, then feed the eagle the rest, and the game never specifies that the meat makes for two servings, as the pie is required later on. Eating the pie, feeding it to the bird or letting the bird starve all make the game unbeatable.
  • Then there's the time you have to save a rat from a cat. This requires a boot (or a stick, but odds are, you've already used the stick), which is in the middle of the vast, trackless desert, making it very easy to miss. Much later in the game, you are tied up, unable to free yourself or do anything else. There is only one escape: if you saved the rat, then it will eat through the ropes. If you didn't save it, or if you didn't even know it was there...then there's no escape. And even if you did save it, you need another item to escape the room you are in. If you don't have it, the game lets you thrash around for about a minute before abruptly crushing your hopes with a Game Over.
  • Don't even think about going into the dark forest without the bottle, the amulet, and the honeycomb. Not that you would ever know that you'll need those items... and only those items.
  • You only have a few moments to retrieve both of the items you need from the temple in the desert, after which you can never go back in. The gold coin is very easy to miss, as it is right next to a larger, more conspicuous bottle. (You are, however, told that you need a gold coin much earlier in the game)
  • Near the end of this game, you need to capture the wizard's cat to prevent him from telling his master that you're here. If you fail to capture him and he spots you, he says something and leaves; you don't get an immediate game over. You can continue and even save the game, but the game is now unwinnable—the wizard will appear about 15 seconds later and kill you. Save the game after failing to catch the cat? Have fun starting over from scratch. This is in the last part of this game, mind you!
  • Another one near the end that borders on Evil: a monster will appear at random and throw you into a dungeon, which you can escape from only once, and only if you remembered to give something to an NPC earlier on. The truly absurd bit is that before leaving, you must inexplicably stick a fishing hook into a hole in the wall and pull out a piece of moldy cheese, which you'll need for another completely illogical task right before the final battle. Forgot to collect the fishing hook 20 minutes ago? Didn't think to fish for cheese in the wall? Too bad, you lose. But at least you can't eat the cheese by mistake. Probably.
    • If you do end up back in the dungeon, the game once again lets you wander around for a while before giving you a Game Over.
• In King's Quest VI, you unlock the secret fifth island, the Isle of the Mists after completing the labyrinth. You get precisely one chance to explore the island and if you screw up and don't take the scythe with you before you leave, the next time you return to the island (which may be an hour later), some druids will be waiting for you and will promptly take you off to be executed and you will not have the items required for your escape.
• The original Space Quest gave you the chance to sell a hovercraft for money, which you will need. If you refuse, then the would-be buyer will come back and offer to throw in a jetpack as well. If you take his first (jetpack-less) offer then, a few hours of play later, you will find yourself in a situation where you need a jetpack, have no way to get one (or do much of anything besides float in space), and have no idea where you missed the chance to pick one up, Guide Dang It...
• Space Quest IV: Unwinnable scenarios return with a vengeance in IV. Forget to write down the time code for SQXII at the start of the game? Well, too bad. In the floppy version (but, mercifully, not the CD remake), the code is randomized—you can't even look it up. Plenty of plot-crucial items can also be Lost Forever. And there are Guide Dang It puzzles again.
  • For those trying to get 100% completion, there's a truly evil bit with the "Unstable Ordnance". When you pick it up, the game warns you that it's dangerous, but you receive points for it. When you fall into the sewers, it goes boom. So you decide not to pick it up next time, and beat the game. You failed 100% completion. Okay, you then pick it up after you get back out of the sewers instead. You get unavoidably lasered when trying to leave the area by Schroedinger's Enemy (he doesn't show if you didn't pick it up). Okay, try again. You pick it up, then put it back. This yields a profit in points, and accounts for your missing points—but you still get zapped by the same enemy! To get 100% completion, you must pick it up and then put it back before entering the sewers. Every other choice either blocks 100% completion or makes the game unwinnable if you save after it. The only reason this doesn't quite qualify as evil is how soon after your screwup the game ends.
• Leisure Suit Larry 3 is ridiculous. There is a point where you play Passionate Patti; forgetting even an insignificant piece of attire makes the game unwinnable. (Women have more clothing than you think.)
• Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), aka Leisure Suit Larry 2, is even worse: The entire game is strictly linear from start to finish, with several chokepoints where it's impossible to go back to a previous area. As an example: Larry starts the game in L.A., and later moves on to a cruise boat, where he has to escape to a lifeboat before nightfall. To survive the journey on the lifeboat, he needs to have, among other things, a giant soft drink that can only be purchased in L.A. The game needs to be started over if he didn't get one way back when.^[3] The worst, however, is that there are two items that Larry can pick up on the cruise ship (one of them being a bowl of spinach dip) that count towards 100% Completion but must be discarded in the few seconds of interactivity you have before your lifeboat goes adrift, which many players might not even realize exist. (Larry will eat the spinach dip automatically and die of salmonella). And this whole process needs to be repeated several times during the game's other chokepoints.
• In the original Leisure Suit Larry, after cutting yourself free from the rope in the honeymoon suite, if you leave the room without taking the rope then the game becomes unwinnable since you can't go back into the room. Unusually for Leisure Suit Larry, the game gives you no warning about this, and it's easy to miss.
• Rise of the Dragon can be Guide Dang It. There are many ways of getting permanently stuck: locking yourself out of your home (although in this one case, there is a way to recover), leaving vital items lying around somewhere (thus losing them forever), picking the wrong dialog option and thus permanently pissing off a vital character (especially your girlfriend—women can be so sensitive...), or letting important events go by unnoticed because you weren't in the right place at the right time. In some cases, the game will inform you when you've screwed up or are about to so you don't hang around wondering what went wrong.
  • Heart Of China, by the same designer, also suffers from this. Sierra seems to have a thing for bastard designers.

Hell examples:

• Gold Rush can screw you over at any opportunity. Lethal Diseases and deadly bridges aside,^[4] there are several distinct ways to make the game unwinnable:
  • Sold your house without entering it? You're missing two required items.
  • Sold your house after looking through your album? Odds are, you missed the family picture you could get, with no prompt, rendering a very late-game puzzle impossible to complete (a later item, only available after a specific time, hints at the photo).
  • Pick mules on the land route? Indians attack, Game Unwinnable (but at least you're told that this is the case)!
  • Mistime the departure on the land route? You won't make it. Guaranteed (either your stagecoach gets stuck in the mud early on, or, after several puzzles, you'll be caught in the same snowstorm that almost killed the Donners).
  • Lose your mule? Can't reach your brother's shack.^[5]
    • Fail to switch your mule for one with an identical brand on it? Same result.
  • Drop down into the outhouse without the items necessary to open the door? You can't get out again, game unwinnable.
  • The worst part about the above is that there's only a few walkthroughs out there, and NONE of them are perfectly accurate - following any of them religiously will produce a game over.
• Codename: ICEMAN has some unbelievable examples:
  • Most notably, a CIA guard will ask for your id and give you the wrong one back, even though you're the only one present. If you don't check the id and notice the mistake immediately, you lose much later.
  • When unexpectedly becoming Captain of a submarine due to an injury, you have to perform duties that real captains leave to their crew. This is doubly annoying because your character wouldn't be expected to know the ship better than its own NCOs. If you don't do them, there will be failures at critical moments.

Infocom

• The Infocom text adventure The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy contained some deliberate, devilish cases of obscure things that needed to be done within a certain time frame. For instance, at the end of the game, Marvin will ask you for a specific tool to repair the ship with. The tool required is arbitrarily selected from a pool of ten; if you don't have one of those ten items, then the game will choose that one. So, if you left the toothbrush in your bedroom at the beginning of the game, then you'll be forced to start over completely.
  • If you miss your appointment with Marvin by failing to work out how to get into the niche in exactly twelve turns? Then you're stuck.
  • Even more infamous—if only because it's early enough in the game that more people see it before giving up—is the notorious "Babel Fish Dispenser" puzzle, wherein the player must use a pile of junk mail picked up at his doorstep back on Earth. By then, the planet Earth has been blown up, forcing players who forgot the junk mail (which is likely—if they take too long trying to pick things up, then they'll be flattened by a bulldozer) to restart their games for any chance of a satisfactory ending. What makes the puzzle even more ridiculous is that in order to obtain the Babel Fish, the mail must be used in a variety of ways, each way non-obvious until you dispense another fish, and the latest method of failure gives you a hint for a new necessary step—but if you proceed step-by-step according to the hints, the dispenser will run out of fish at the last (otherwise successful) attempt. At least here you can reload and use what you've learned.
  • Most infamous of all is the cheese sandwich puzzle, in which failing to feed a random stray dog early in the game while you're rushing urgently on a timer will cause the game to be Unwinnable much later. You get a second chance at that puzzle (you relive that portion of the game as Ford and can have him do it), but there's no clue to do it then, either.
  • One more: When Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz has you strapped down and is reciting Vogon poetry to you, you have one chance to enjoy the poetry, which makes him continue on to the second verse. You must hear that verse to get the password to open a display case containing a Plot Coupon which you may not need until hours later. And you can't use a guide for this, because the case doesn't always ask for the same word.
  • Douglas Adams once gleefully described the game as "user-mendacious".
  • Leaked design notes for the unfinished Hitchhiker's Guide 2 game suggest including a puzzle whose solution causes the game to become essentially Unwinnable (ignoring a one-in-a-million random chance). Only by not solving the puzzle and losing the points could the player have won the game. This is just how the people at Infocom used to think.
• The Spellcasting X01 series of games was phenomenally restrictive about what you had to do and when you had to do it; if a day passed by without one tiny thing being taken care of, the game became unwinnable.
• In Zork Zero, the player must cast a spell on an item and then has exactly 18 turns to use the item before it changes back. Once it is restored, the item cannot be transformed again.
• Return to Zork can be made unwinnable in so many ways:
  • Place the rats into the box with the mice.
  • Give the token to the ferryman on the way to Canuk's island (unless you are carrying the whistle).
  • Turn Canuk back into a duck before you've gotten the disc piece from the bottle.
  • Feed the rotten meat to the vultures without drugging it first.
  • Get in trouble with the Guardian and lose your items. Even if you avoid losing items by dropping them first, you can still render the game unwinnable if you kill or anger a character who still serves some purpose. This can be achieved in the following ways (to name a few):
    • Harming any character with your knife or sword.
    • Taking the bra box from in front of Pugney's Ranch before he tells you that you can "take that ludicrous box out there too."
  • Lose important items by chucking them in the incinerator, although that ought to be an obvious don't (except for the one item you DO need to chuck in there!).
  • In the veeery first area in the game, there is a bonding plant. You need to take the bonding plant and keep it alive throughout the entire game. If you hold onto a dead bonding plant, then you can't get into the comedy club, which makes the game unwinnable. It's RIDICULOUSLY easy to kill the bonding plant.
    • There's a way around this: if you destroy the dead bonding plant, a new one will regrow in the Valley of the Vultures, and you can use the whistle to get it.
• In Planetfall, entering the rad labs turns the game unwinnable. That's fair, since the game explicitly tells you not to do so. But it also taunts you by having important-looking items in there. These items could be useful, but you won't live long enough to use them.
  • Slightly worse: keeping a magnet close to any of your cards longer than absolutely necessary will blank the cards without warning.
• In Stationfall, the sequel to Planetfall, it feels like the boots will scramble your card in a single turn.
  • Putting the explosive in the thermos doesn't stop that item from evaporating; it merely slows it down by a factor of four while silencing the messages you would otherwise get about it. This is no fun if you decide to stash your safecracker tools in one location one by one as you get them; when you've got them all some hundred turns later, you'll find out that one thing has silently evaporated on you.
• Infocom's Suspended can be made unwinnable before the first normal command (not counting system commands like save/restore). Setting "Impossible" difficulty does just that—now the player's Sun is due to go nova in a few minutes, so there's not much point trying to find the right-length wire to fix the complex's systems, is there? Infocom was the best.
• Infocom's Tombs & Treasure on the NES has exactly one instance of this. Walk into a cave from the Ball Court. Hey, that's a nice jewel on that pedestal, I think I'll take it...oh no, the door closed and I'm trapped! That's it, game over, better reset! (The game tells you this is pretty much those words). You can get that jewel, but not right then.
• In Enchanter, the Kulcad scroll can only be used once. It cancels magic. Since every puzzle you encounter is basically a magical trap, the spell allows you to "cheat" your way past any puzzle in the game. Doing this gives you no warning that you've done anything wrong—until you get to the endgame and lack the spell you need to win.
• Hell example: Fail the copy protection in Infocom's Spellbreaker. The game lies to you and tells you that you passed it. Many hours later, when you reach the end of the game and find it unwinnable, you look in the hint book and realize what happened.

Other Video Games

• KGB, aka Conspiracy, was a hugely involved espionage adventure game in which it was recommended and nearly required to take notes in order to make any progress. It was VERY easy to make the game unwinnable:
  • At one point, the main character investigates a butcher shop. Under the desk is a small button. Push it, and nothing seems to happen. Push it again, or don't push it at all, and you die to a trap 10 minutes later. The game never informs you of this button, and it can't be found without pixel hunting.
  • When checking into a hotel room, you get a mysterious phone call saying only "check the lights." Then you needed to switch the lights on 3 times. Switch them on only once? You die. Twice? You die. Turn them off totally? Dead. And you have to break a cypher, or remember the character who can break it for you, to know what to do if you want to live.
  • The ENTIRE GAME is timed. It's easy to render it unwinnable by dawdling too long.
  • At one point, you have to confront the butcher about what you found in his shop. But if you talked to him even once before, he will never open his door to you again. Especially annoying since just a little while before, it looks like you are supposed to interview everyone in the building for clues.
  • Yet another example: a mad scientist you are questioning can escape, and he has a nervous breakdown before you can ask every possible question. You did not ask the only important one? You cannot leave the location.
• The infamous Marathon Man challenge from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Don't listen to any fans claiming to have done it or have found some way to do so, or even people who have cheated and beaten it with 0:00 on the time or less, the Marathon Man will ALWAYS beat you to the Kokori Forest bridge—even Word of God has confirmed that he cannot be beaten. Anyone who dares to say otherwise tends to get Gannon Banned.
  • To be fair, some of the reasoning fueling the methods you can beat him was through Word of God also mentioning that there was a method to beat him initially, and it had something to do with either the bunny hood and its properties to increase one's speed, or the Song of Time's power to slow or stop time during the race. The problem is that Word of God also mentioned that this was scrapped, and it's been proven that even at a time of 0:00:00 speed, the Marathon Man will claim he still beat you by a second or millisecond.
• In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, everyone can be killed. However, killing a critical character will render the game Unwinnable by plot design. When you kill any necessary character, the game displays this message:

With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have entered.

• • Some NPCs are listed as critical characters when they are not, and give you the doomed world message when they are killed. Crazy Batou is one such NPC. He attacks the player character on sight and possesses a very useful and valuable item.
  • Morrowind also has many examples of Hell on the Cruelty Scale, as some NPCs in Morrowind aren't marked as essential to the Main Quest and will not give you the doomed world message if you kill them, but you won't discover that they are essential to the Main Quest until much, much later in the game.
  • The seven-minute Speed Run of Morrowind—watch it here, or watch an even shorter run here—demonstrates that Munchkin tricks can be used to bypass the plot routes altogether. This changes the problem: the only way to render Morrowind Unwinnable when those tricks are taken into consideration is to collect and then misplace either of the two essential Plot Coupons.
• In Hugo's House of Horrors 2, if you bump into the side of the bridge (a ludicrously easy thing to do), then you'll drop your matches. You need these matches to progress. There is no way to dry the matches, nor is there any other way to set fire to the things you need to burn.
• In Legend of Kyrandia, you can find two apples. Click one and Brandon will take a bite of it. Click the second, and you have nothing to trade the gnome to get the royal chalice back and you might as well restart.
• Dracula Unleashed was an Full Motion Video video game that was also part adventure. There are numerous times where you can make the game unwinnable. A few of them are Guide Dang It moments. One requires you to go to a bookstore late at night so you know there is a secret passage there. If you didn't go there, then you don't know that there is a clue you can look for. And if you go into the Asylum unprepared, then Hellsing is strangled in front of you and you can do nothing more but wait for a Game Over.
• Defied Trope by much every LucasArts adventure game after Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders; these games always allow the player to go back and collect items that they need or refuse to let them continue without the required item. This was often viewed as "dumbing down adventure games for the masses" by hardcore Sierra enthusiasts. LucasArts believed that players should not be punished for experimenting in their games, and criticised Sierra's combination of this trope and Trial and Error Gameplay as "sadistic". All their adventure game manuals explicitly stated their design philosophy as being "We believe that you buy games to be entertained, not to be whacked over the head every time you make a mistake. [...] We think you'd prefer to solve the game's mysteries by exploring and discovering, not by dying a thousand deaths."
  • In Monkey Island, if you stay underwater for more than ten minutes after the sheriff throws you off the pier, then the game not only kills you but also continues, giving you the commands float, bloat, bob, and order hint book. The last option gives you the LucasArts helpline phone number.
  • The LucasArts Game Development Philosophy is referenced in The Curse of Monkey Island when Guybrush Threepwood enters a state of faux death and a pair of side characters remark how they thought "you couldn't die in LucasArts games" and that the developers must be "trying something different".
  • Aaaaaaaah! Radioactive steam!
  • Of course, the manual for Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders might be the least appropriate place to state the LucasArts Design Philosophy since it was like a Sierra game. Missed something in Maniac Mansion? No problem... you can beat the game with your other partner. But in "Zak McKracken," there was only one way to beat the game. Washed the bread crumbs down the drain? Spent your money and got stuck at a place where you can't win the lottery to gain more money? Accidentally killed someone by removing their helmet on Mars? Got Zak and Annie stuck in jail? Then you can't beat the game. And despite that, Zak McKracken is still more merciful than Sierra by virtue of not murdering you every five minutes.
• Darkseed, which featured art by H. R. Giger, thrives on this. The game has a rather specific solution, complete with many chances to screw up before the end. For example, you only have enough money to buy two items at the store, there are many items available, and you need to buy the right two to win... and you can't buy them at the same time. For another example, you need to set up an alternate way to enter your house before you ever learn that the main way will be blocked. Also, you're playing in "real time", and you need to be in the right place at the right time for certain events. Essentially, the game expects you to keep starting over from the beginning until you get it right.
  • You need to get put in jail at ONE point in this game with three specific items that you need to put in your cell for later to finish the game.
  • To see exactly how bad it is, check out this playthrough by Slowbeef.
    • See also: His and Diabetus' RP of the longplay.
  • The sequel didn't change anything. If you die, then you're told that you can't die because of your importance. However, you only get this once. To finish the game, you need to die at a specific time; if you die and think you're safe before then—tough luck.
• The horror RPG/adventure game Elvira 2 - Jaws of Cerberus can be easily made unwinnable - especially by destroying a vital item, such as by using it up for a spell, or for the wrong spell (or by using up a spell at the wrong place and time). In addition, entering the wrong room without appropriate protection may will result in your death (and you have no idea about the danger until after you die).
  • Elvira 2 is pretty much Made Of Unwin. One of the worst instances: at one point, you need to animate a Frankenstein's Monster so that it moves away from a door that it obstructs. However, if you click on the monster's head beforehand, then you'll automatically cut off the wires connected to its head, making it impossible to animate. The worst thing is, the game never tells you that you have cut the wires; there are no hints that clicking on the head would have any ill effect.
  • Some other situations seem unwinnable but have alternate solutions (though you can block them, too). For example, if you fail to get poison from the mad scientist (you only get one try, after which he'll throw you out of his lab and lock the door), you can instead get the key from the piranha aquarium using a telekinesis spell. But if you have only one TK spell (it depends on your level and intelligence) and you spend it here, then you have made the game unwinnable once again.
• In Jigsaw, you must collect all sixteen jigsaw pieces to restore history in each time period. While there's a device that tells you if there are jigsaw pieces in your current time period that you haven't found yet, it's sometimes easy to make collecting them impossible, especially when you don't realize that a piece is in an area that later becomes inaccessible. For instance, there are the jigsaw pieces you're supposed to pick up during the mission in "Siberia": fail to press the right button in the missile before it flies out or fail to retrieve the cable you used to get down to the missile so you can use it again on the goose's nest, and at least one of these pieces will be Lost Forever. But the most Egregious Unwinnable situation involves the drawing competition at the end of the game. If you haven't drawn at least four animals in the sketchbook over the course of the game, then you can't get the competition prize you need to complete the game. Oh, you didn't get the sketchbook from inside the stool or the pencil under the stool before all the historical intrigue began? Then you had better restart.
• Kemco's NES version of Deja Vu had one unwinnable scenario—if you've used up your last 3 coins going somewhere other than Peoria and already taken a free cab ride.
• The games of Magnetic Scrolls tended to be hideously prone to Unwinnable situations, requiring precise courses of action to win, and they invoked a lot of tropes: Trial and Error Gameplay, Timed Missions, Guide Dang It, Lost Forever, Point of No Return, Moon Logic Puzzle, and then some. Examples:
  • Fish! required that you follow one path through the game almost exactly, and that required more guesswork than skill. Even if you worked it out, it's possible to lose because of a time limit that no one told you existed!
  • In Corruption, you must be in several right places at several right times, a series of events must be completed in a specific order, and you must avoid a set of pitfalls that you don't know exist even after you lose. Failure to work things out properly can result in anything from long-term imprisonment to your sudden inexplicable death. And then there's The Hospital, where over fifty moves must be done in perfect and precise order without a single indication of what they are.
  • Guild of Thieves had puzzles so mind-breaking and deliriously insane that even walkthroughs won't always help. It is possible to destroy your ability to complete the game with one wrong command, and there are hundreds of wrong commands. Famously, opening a bag you've just found instantly destroys the ancient sheet music that you didn't know was in there.
• The 1984 Namco arcade game The Tower of Druaga features a hero going through a 60 level tower. Each level has a hidden treasure. Some treasures are bad and make the game unwinnable. This fact might not be discovered until many levels later; nor can the item's properties be discerned until it is obtained. A rare case of Guide Dang It in a arcade game.
• In Grand Theft Auto III, conflicting missions can make 100% completion impossible if taken out of order. For instance, one mission will have you betray a crime boss's trust and kill him—a bad idea if you haven't finished his missions for you yet. Some players were surprised.
  • Also, certain missions in the Portland area, such as the ambulance missions, can become unwinnable after you kill the Mafia boss because the Mafia will be all over you like flies on a carcass.
• In Monty On The Run, as a form of Copy Protection, you have to look up the right items for Monty's freedom kit in the manual. Choose the wrong items, and the game is unwinnable.
• In Castle Smurfenstein, a hacked version of the original Apple II Castle Wolfenstein, the game was deliberately modified so that it's impossible to get past first level.
• Wing Commander III: Heart Of The Tiger has a campaign path depending on your performance on previous missions where you fight against an endless wave of Kilrathi until you either quit the game or die.
  • It is possible to outlast the "endless" wave of Kilrathi and destroy all the guns on the mother ship at which point you can shoot the mother ship forever with no results. At that point, quitting is the only option.
• Wing Commander IV has a point where the plot wants you to defect to the Union of Border Worlds. If you decline the second of two chances and choose to stay with Confed, then infinite waves of Border World bombers spawn until your carrier is destroyed, ending the game. If you cheat and remove all the enemy craft from the mission, then your carrier explodes on its own.
  • What made this infuriating is that Wing Commander IV billed itself as giving the player the choice of defecting or staying loyal to Confed. Technically, it did; but it punished that second choice hard!
• In Omikron: The Nomad Soul, a robotic character will make an offhand mention of his aching joints amid a wall of dialogue. If you don't then go out and find some oil for said robot, then the door locks, the game becomes unwinnable, and you won't find out until much later.
• Warhammer Fantasy Battle: Shadow of the Horned Rat had a stage with so many Orcs it was deemed "impossible" by the makers themselves, and for good reason: there was no stage beyond it. One wily player managed to get through only to have the game lock up as it tried to load a stage that didn't exist.
• The never-released Penn & Teller: Smoke and Mirrors game was a big collection of Mind Screw minigames. The "central" game "Smoke & Mirrors" was a platformer-RPG-adventure-ish construct where you play as Penn & Teller themselves. The game came with two difficulties: Normal and Impossible. If you play on Impossible, you get to walk down a street for about a screen before running into Lou Reed, who kills the duo by shooting lightning from his eyes. There's no way to avoid this.

"Sorry boys, this is Impossible mode. Impossible doesn't mean 'very difficult.' 'Very difficult' is winning the Nobel Prize. 'Impossible' is eating the sun."

• In the SNES version of Shadowrun, if you don't select the "Talk" option during one of your first conversations of the game, you'll miss a vital "Ask About..." topic that would make it impossible to continue. You won't discover this until about two-thirds of the game later.
• In the original Alone in the Dark, you need two small mirrors to defeat the Nightgaunts at the top of the stairs and proceed further into the game. If a monster attacks you just once while you are carrying the mirrors, then they will shatter and are Lost Forever. There are only two mirrors in the entire game. Without both of them intact, the game is unwinnable.
  • Two other possible unwinnable situations are neglecting to unlock the passage back into the basement so you can get back after the bridge collapses, and running out of fuel for the oil lamp, which you need to reach and defeat the Final Boss.
  • The second game has a bullet-proof vest which reduces damage and keeps Carnby from getting stun-locked. It has limited durability, and if you break it before an area where you must fight off multiple gun-wielding enemies at once, all you'll be able to do is watch Carnby in a Santa suit repeatedly flinch and then fall down dead.
• The Dirty Harry game for the NES has a completely normal-looking room which you cannot exit after you enter it, forcing you to reset the system. It's not a bug -- the door is replaced with graffiti saying, "ha ha ha."
• Similar to the Dirty Harry example above, in Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, if you check your televisions clock at 4:44, your game will freeze. A pretty surprising move from the developers for a game about running a farm.
  • Actually, that was most likely a bug. In the original Japanese version, checking the TV would give you the message "The time is 4:44" over and over before closing the window. Something got bungled when the game was localized, causing the TV to just lock up the game instead.
• An minigame Easter Egg in one of the Homestar Runner shorts is intentionally unwinnable. It's "Super Kingio Brothers," and it's essentially the first screen of Super Mario Bros.... except you're playing as the ludicrously unhealthy King of Town. Who cannot jump over the first Goomba and moves too slow to even attempt to make it to the question block with a mushroom in it, not that he'd probably be able to reach that one either.
  • If you right click and uncheck "play" you can make the Goomba stop, and, no, you can't reach the question mark block.

King of Town: My life's a joke...

• The Freescape game Dark Side included sensors which zapped you into a prison cell called Io Confinement (often misnamed "I/O Confinement" in maps and walkthroughs) containing an item needed to finish the game, which could only be exited by firing at energy-draining doodads by the door, causing the door to open once you'd sacrificed enough energy. Heaven help you if you ended up there with insufficient energy to do that, or to survive for long once out—or if you destroyed the sensors before they could imprison you.
  • The first game, Driller, had an even worse feature. Both Driller and Dark Side have a game map in the shape of a rhombicuboctahedron (18 squares and 8 triangles, of which 3 squares and a triangle meet at every corner), the back-story in both cases being that this is an artificial world built around a natural moon by the erection of the square platforms over the moon's surface. In Dark Side, the triangular facets are simply inaccessible (blocked off by forcefields), but in Driller it's possible to drive off the edge of a platform and fall through the triangular hole onto the surface of the original moon... from which there is no way back, so it's quit-and-restart time.
• The Impossible Quiz. As you progress through the game, you're given skips, which you can use to skip most questions. But the last question is introduced as either the easiest question or the hardest. It turns out that you have to use all your skips to pass it. If you used even one before this, then the game is impossible to win and you have to start over from the beginning.
• Phantasy Star III can become unwinnable if you engage in a little Script Breaking in the beginning by using an Escapipe (which lets you escape dungeons instantly) after being arrested. Apparently, you don't just break the script, you break the whole game. It's a logical place to use an Escapipe if you're not Genre Savvy enough to know you shouldn't have it yet, so the game designers provide messages telling you that you made the game unwinnable after the fact. This also counts as By Insanity, but Seanbaby seems to have made the error sincerely.
• In Nitemare 3D, there are a handful of block- or tombstone-pushing puzzles. Because of the simplicity of the game engine, there is no way to "pull" these items back toward you. Yes, there are places where you can push some of them that permanently block critical paths. It's usually clear immediately when you've messed up.
• The ZX Spectrum port of the arcade game Great Gurianos used up so much memory that there was no room to include the ending. Dave Perry was forced to make the final boss undefeatable.
• While still polite compared to others (you just have to die, rather than restart the game), Yoshi's Island DS makes nearly every secret level potentially Unwinnable by Design. The last secret level, for example—Yoshi's Island Easter Eggs—has a room in which there's a platform powered by shooting eggs at it. You can and often will run out long before reaching the end, there's no backtracking, and your only hope is the instakill spikes surrounding you. On occasion, your platform just goes straight past a spike covered obstacle that needs to be raised and gets stuck on the other side.
• Ravenskull features such jollities as floor squares that make gates trap you in or objects disappear from your inventory when stood on. Many of these contain treasures and thus have to be stood on; the puzzle is working out the correct order to perform certain tasks so as to prevent an Unwinnable outcome occurring.
• Tower of the Sorcerer includes an altar where you can give money to raise your stats. The price goes up on a quadratic scale with each use. The catch? Later levels have additional altars that give you a greater stat increase; but each time you use one, the price goes up for all of them. Using the first one too much can make it impossible to progress.
• A game simply known as Bow and Arrow had a level in which a white dove passes by the main character, followed by swarms of black birds. If the player failed to exterminate even one of the black birds, then a later level is impossible. The game's story between levels does say that the dove is carrying a message from you to a helpful wizard, and the later level does say, "I hope the message got to XYZ". The game did not explicitly say, however, that all the black birds had to be eliminated.
• Alex Kidd in Miracle World had a situation that counted as Unwinnable when the game was released. If you didn't pick up the letter your brother talked about, then you did not receive the stone slab with the combination on it to unlock the last part of the game. The stone slab is not required, however, if you know the combination of by heart. But if you don't know the code at all, then this renders the game Unwinnable. Guide Dang It now, but the guides probably wouldn't give you the code without the slab then.
• Anyone who's ever heard of Final Fantasy XI has heard about Absolute Virtue. It turns out it was originally supposed to be unbeatable. Then people started beating it, but every time a winning strategy was found against Absolute Virtue, the dev. team altered either its behavior or the mechanics of the game to break the strategy. They would also occasionally ban the players who won using it.
  • Actually, the development team had its own strategy for how it wanted Absolute Virtue to be defeated, and even went so far as to disseminate a video detailing how to do it. What makes it satisfy this trope is that said strategy relies on countering the boss' actions within a given window, actually requiring, as a minimum, the use of third-party programs to monitor the chat log... which in turn violates the Terms of Service Agreement. Since alternate (yet game legal) strategies were promptly smacked down, if you wanted a false hope of besting Absolute Virtue by the development team's standards, you had to break the development team's rules.
    • Once the dev. team raised the level cap to 75, however, Absolute Virtue has been routinely defeated in ways the dev. team has given the stamp of legitimacy to. It's still a pain in the ass though.
  • Strangely, with respect to Absolute Virtue's Aht Urhgan analogue, Pandemonium Warden, the development team neither patched nor banned the players who exploited the Logout and Cannonball tricks. Though not exploits in the traditional sense, they clearly circumvent the boss's thrash-you abilities by out-of-game means as well as the game's mechanics surrounding player death and recovery.
• Final Fantasy IV had the Dark Elf, who lived in a cave where it was highly magnetic and would disable you if you wore anything metal in it. To get past him you needed to have talked with Edward and received a key item. However, if you did not do this, there is nothing stopping you from initiating the battle. While in theory you could defeat him without getting the harp and could still de-equip the armor mid-battle, you could only do so with cheats since the Dark Elf would one-shot any character without armor. If you did not save before-hand, you would have wasted a ton of time.
• ICOM's Uninvited has a Ruby in one of the bedrooms in the game. You are warned not to take it the first time you try. If you choose again to take it, then the game will let you continue and even save until you die after a certain number of moves.
  • There's one location where you can put the ruby down and live. Only. One. Location. It's some kind of pathway outside the house.
• The Gateway series of adventure games by Legend could be made unwinnable, but it was usually obvious when you did. For instance, breaking the PV commset in the beginning of Gateway 1 makes it impossible to receive a crucial message later on, but that's obvious because the screen cracks. Wearing the ring while in the mirror room in Hell in Gateway 1 also eventually makes the portals close, so you'll be stuck. But if that happens, then you can simply type "die" and restart.
• In the Prince of Tennis dating sim Dokidoki Survival, your success getting a character to be your boyfriend usually depends on the number of "heart points" you have earned for interacting with him throughout the game. For Ooishi, however, whether he accepts your feelings also hinges on answering a single question correctly. If you answer wrong, then no matter how full your heart meter is, he won't accept your feelings. What's more, you earn heart points for giving the wrong answer. In fact, you earn the exact same amount as for giving the right answer, and so it's nearly impossible to figure out where you've gone wrong.
• The original Colossal Cave Adventure had a nasty one near the end—after you deposit the last treasure, you have a small number of moves to get back into the cave system before you're locked out of it (literally). If you're anywhere in the caves when the timer expires, then you're whisked to the last two locations; if you aren't, then you can't get back in—and thus can't end the game.
• Kitaniji in The World Ends With You invokes this trope towards the end of the game by taking all of Neku's potential partners as his entry fee for week 3. Unfortunately for him, Beat subverts it.
• In the 14-15 or "boss" puzzle (one of the first group-theory puzzles, if not the first), only half the possible arrangements of the tiles can be reached from the solved position by sliding the tiles as one is supposed to do to solve the puzzle. Sam Loyd exploited this to publicise the puzzle by offering a cash prize for solving a position which he knew to be in the unsolvable group.
• Later songs in the Guitar Hero franchise are charted so that it's impossible (or at least highly improbable) to beat them on Expert with a regular controller—as in, the type that came with your console. Yes, it is possible to play Guitar Hero without a guitar controller—especially on XBoxen—but it clearly must not be encouraged.
• In Shift, on one level, if you press a particular button, you are trapped in an inescapable little area with spikes above you, and it reveals a message 'suicide time!' that describes the only way to get out of there. Death Is a Slap on The Wrist, though - it simply restarts the level.
  • On one screen of Shift 4, if you take a certain key before you use a certain arrow, that arrow will get covered, and you will be trapped in a black rectangular area with no way out and no spikes to impale yourself on. Time for the R key!
• EverQuest had a subversion with the Sleeper. This fight was intended to be hopeless, but the designers didn't tell that to the players, so they would try anyway. They were careful to not make the boss actually invincible, so others would try it on other servers too. And there can be only one attempt on the entire server, ever. The quest to wake the sleeper can only be completed once and cannot be finished by any other players after completion. Once the raid inevitably wipes, this boss runs rampant through the entire continent of Velious and kills a major NPC. It was killed on ONE server many years later with Zerg Rush tactics in a raid force consisting of over 300 players.
• This Xkcd comic is responsible for this Tetris variant. Unwinnable? Oh yes.
  • Semi-related: I-Mockery's Tetris: Charity Edition. The intro screen promises that I-Mockery will donate money to charity for every player that clears 20 lines or more in A-Type mode (no such promises for R-Type mode). However, once you breach the 15-line mark, NES characters fall instead of Tetris blocks. They...can't fit together in any line-clearing fashion. Then the game's ending chastizes you for not even being able to clear twenty measly lines. Truly, one of I-Mockery's cruelest April Fools' Day jokes of all time.
    • It's R-Type mode is equally unbeatable, since the Advancing Wall of Doom eventually moves too fast for you to destroy quick enough.
    • It's still possible to sneak in a Tetris after you clear line 16, if an I piece is next, clearing 20 lines total. However, you still do not advance to level 3, as the game refuses to recognize that last cleared line, and sticks the counter at 19.
  • Further Defictionalized here, with a Flash version of the make-up comic.
• From Eye of the Beholder 2:
  • Temple Level 2 had two rooms with doors that permanently closed after you entered them, trapping your party. You had to reload a saved game to continue.
  • Silver Tower Level 2 had a room with a pile of magic items and a dying Darkmoon priest. You have to kill the priest to get the treasure—but if you do, then the pressure plate he's lying on releases and the door closes, trapping you forever.
• Ironically subverted in Starfleet Academy on the Super Nintendo. You are given The Kobayashi Maru scenario as a graduation requirement. It's supposed to be unwinnable. However, due to the way the video game is designed, it's entirely possible to engage the Klingons and beat them.
• Clock Tower 2 (3 in Japan) features several unwinnable scenarios, most of which involve talking to a particular character in the wrong form. Two particularly cruel instances involve situations that the game doesn't properly warn you about:
  • Shortly after the protagonist survives an attack from the first enemy of the game, she leaves the room the enemy is lying in and stands in the hallway. You're supposed to turn around and lock the door with the key you used to open the room, but this is never made clear anywhere. If you don't lock the door and you leave the hallway, then the game becomes unwinnable and one of the worst endings will play shortly after reaching another section of the house.
  • The worst case is the samurai armor the player has to inspect. It can only be examined in the first section of the game. Failure to do so will result in the armor dropping out of a window during an unavoidable cutscene several hours later, killing the player character and securing a bad ending long after anything could be done to avoid it.
• Pathologic is cruel—you don't realise how deeply you've failed until up to 12 hours later. Some gamers have had breakdowns when they realize that they're going to have to start over because they didn't pick up something from an unmarked house.
  • Turgor, Ice-pick's better translated game is worse. Much of the game centers around the allocation of a resource that slowly kills the entire game world every time you use it, meaning you have to think wisely about what you're doing. You would think that the cleaner translation would mean that the game would actually instruct you on how to not lock yourself into an unwinnable state, but no such luck.
• The second Tex Murphy game, Martian Memorandum. Aside from all the unfair scenarios, such as preparing to survive for several days in a fridge, you can get screwed bad at the casino on Mars: if, while in the mob boss's office, you fail to do and get everything necessary before you leave, then you're boned. Trying to go back there ever again gets you murdered instantly. But you do have to go there the first time to move the plot.
• The fourth Tex Murphy game, Pandora Directive is very fair but it does have a single evil example. If you enter Dag Horton's office on your first visit to Autotech you'll be free to ransack the place and pick up several useful items. Except you should wonder why the "Travel" button just become unavailable. As soon as you exit the office you're caught and killed. If you saved inside the office you've no choice but to reload an earlier save or restart the game.
  • On the other hand, trying to get the Good Ending of said game is pure Hell all the way through. Unless you use the "jky" cheat code to see your exact karma points and event flags, you have no way of knowing where, how or if you went wrong.
• A big one in Out of This World, among other examples: If you flood the cave with water but fail to shoot out the wall of the pit so you can get back into the flooded caverns as well as cross the pit, then you'll be stuck wandering with your hands in your pockets, unable to progress. You also get stuck if Buddy gets killed.
  • Fortunately the games checkpoint system is based on tasks, and not position, so you cannot save after making the game unwinnable. Even if you can't find a way to kill yourself, you can always use your current password to go back far enough to fix things. There are no passwords that do not allow you to win.
• In The Theater, an RPG maker game, the final boss battle can be made unwinnable. An imp just before the battle offers you passage to a final save point after a difficult puzzle; in return, you need to give him one of your items. All but one of your items are needed to defeat the boss. Oh, well, that's not so bad; you can just load your sa- OH, WAIT, YOU JUST SAVED! There is no hint beforehand that this will make it impossible to win. The creator, when questioned, claimed that he added this feature because no other game had done it.
• The NES billiards game Lunar Ball allows the friction of the pool table to be altered. It goes as far down as 0 -- no friction. At 0, balls will move at a constant speed, making it possible for the balls to be caught in an infinite loop if none of them are pocketed.
• In Devil Survivor, during the Boss Rush that precedes the Final Boss, there is one particular boss that only you, the main character, can damage (and thus kill). If you die, and no live character or demon has (Sama)Recarm on hand, then the battle keeps going... without a chance of winning.
• The 1980s platform adventure game Dizzy had a nasty situation two screens from the starting position. A bridge over a deep crevasse needs to be crossed many times during the course of the game. Many, many times. If just once you tread in the middle of it rather than jump, then the bridge vanishes. It doesn't respawn.
• In Blaster Master's sixth stage, there's one point where you can shoot upwards through a set of blocks and enter a door, but when you return, the blocks will have respawned, and you can't shoot downwards, so you're stuck for good unless you commit suicide. In some other places like this, you can't do that either, so the only option is to reset.
• Rainbird's text adventure Legend of the Sword took this to the limit and beyond. Your character's Hyperactive Metabolism meant you burned through your life force at a tremendous rate, so you had to do things in a very specific order for you to avoid dying of lost energy. On top of this, there were numerous ways to leave something behind when irreversibly entering a new area. The combination of these two factors meant that the situation at any given time would almost always be unwinnable.
• Fate/stay night usually kills you outright when you mess up, but features an example that fits the "cruel" category: refusing to cooperate with Rin during Saber's route will jump you to Rin's route, but won't kill you until more than a day later after you've made several decisions, culminating with the game automatically picking a path that gets you killed. The Tiger Dojo is kind enough to point out how far back the decision actually is, but it's long enough the player might have overwritten any saves early enough, forcing them to start over completely.
  • To make matters worse, there's another example on the "Heaven's Feel" route when Rin asks you to pledge allegiance to her, or else she'll not help you. It looks like an obvious choice, right? it's not. This time you MUST refuse to form a contract with her, or else, when it's decided that Sakura must die, you won't be able to go against Rin and you'll get a Bad End.. Luckily, Rin herself states in-story where you screwed the pooch and the Tiger Dojo drills the point even further with a good dose of Fourth Wall breakage, but between the fatal decision and the Bad end there's a LONG day and since nothing seems to indicate you fucked up (aside from Rin looking crestfallen just after the fatal choice) it's very possible you saved the game already.
  • The "Heaven's Feel" route has another one: If you promise Rin that you won't unwrap Archer's arm and later don't do it on your own to test it, Shirou will die roughly two hours of gameplay later, following several other choices, as he gets locked out of a choice to save Sakura that means he won't die. Not only is this just as bad as the Fate example, The Tiger Dojo won't even tell you what you did wrong since not having enough approval with Sakura (from any number of other dialogue options earlier) will lead to the same result.
  • "Heaven's Feel" is littered with these, actually. In one of the most interesting Nonstandard Game Over you can get, after not recruiting Rider's help before going into the final dungeon, Shirou beats Saber at the cost of his mind. To make matters worse, the Tiger Dojo, instead of giving you a hint as what to do, praises you for beating Saber on your own. And that only happens after several other choices are made and a In-Universe day passes.
• Knights of the Old Republic features a timed swoop bike race in Taris where the villain always beats your first time. This means that if you set your best ever time on your first time around, it may very well be impossible for you to defeat your own record.
  • But the plot continues regardless.
• Knights of the Old Republic 2 gives you an option to destroy a Door Control Panel on Telos. If you actually destroy it, you will be unable to enter the room later and thus you won't be able to progress.
• The C64 graphic text adventure Castle of Terror was famous for being literally unwinnable by design. Though a gaming magazine published an account from a reader who claimed to have completed the game, he proved uncontactable when asked for more information. Many years later, the game's creator was eventually tracked down and admitted what many had suspected for years: it was in fact impossible to kill the Count (the main point of the game), and no more than 243 of the 290 total points could be earned.
• Resident Evil Code: Veronica not only has the most limited ammo supply in the series, but in many areas, zombies respawn. Don't blow away your ammo so that you can't get past an unavoidable ambush later in the game. Also, don't take any of the big guns as Claire near the end, especially the Grenade Launcher, or they will be Lost Forever and you will find yourself up the creek without a paddle in the Final Boss fight.
• In Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya, Prince Nick, whose right arm is turned to stone and rendered unusable for the majority of the game, shows up in the confrontation with the Final Boss, Iom. The only thing that can break the invincibility seal on the boss is the titular sword, and he is the only one who can use it. And if Iom happens to kill Nick before he gets a chance to use his sword, which in this battle can easily happen because of how absurdly over-powered the boss is, you'll have to start all over again because it becomes unwinnable.
• Dead Rising and its sequel use this design trope well. The plot to find the root of the conspiracy has several key points where Frank/Chuck have to be at an appointed place at or before a certain time to get info/save someone/defeat someone. (Special emphasis is given to Chuck's daughter, who has to be given medication between 7 and 8 AM every day to prevent zombification.) If they don't perform these actions, a warning will come up on screen saying that "The Truth has disappeared into the darkness" - followed by an option to start over while keeping their previous experience - or letting them still keep playing and trying to just get out alive. And since many of the plot threads and additional survivor scoops overlap, in addition to some of the main characters succumbing to Plotline Death later in the story, letting the plot expire is actually the easiest way to get achievements for saving 50+ survivors.
• The Interactive Fiction game Savoir Faire gives you several opportunities to screw yourself out of victory. One occurs when you have to retrieve a bauble from a high shelf; you not only have to make sure it doesn't shatter, you also need to throw one of your inventory items up there for it to fall down - and the inventory item you use for that purpose can't be retrieved, so you'd better hope that said item isn't one you'll need later on.
• A recurring Minigame in The Simpsons video games, "Larry The Looter", is completely unwinnable. Immediately after looting the electronics store (the only store it's possible to loot), Larry is gunned down by the angry store owner.
• The two playable characters in Head Over Heels have seperate life counters, so it's possible to kill one of them off completely. The game is impossible to beat with only one character though.
• In The Longest Journey there is a risk you'll end up stuck if you don't pick up a certain item inside an archive. There is no early indication you need this item - it's pretty much impossible to know you need it until the very moment you're supposed to use it. What is this item? A can of soda. Which you buy from a inconspicuous vending machine standing inside a building you can't get back into once you've left. Chances are you never even saw the machine.
• Originally, the Level Editor in Glider PRO allowed a switch to be linked to a star. When triggered, the switch would destroy the star permanently without excluding it from the number required to win (or turning off its animation). Later versions ostensibly disabled this, but it could still be done with a bit of trickery. (Not that one really needed it to make houses unwinnable...)
• In one of the story modes in the WWE Smackdown vs. Raw games, If you advance the story by NEVER LOSING A MATCH, and retaining your championship title for many seasons, eventually you will be proposed a special referee match, with Vince McMahon as the referee. The game sets the match rules so that you can't defeat your enemy by doing enough damage a certain body part, knocking them out with a wrestler's signature move, 10 count ring-out, or anything else other than a 3 count pin. The match is intentionally designed that the referee will NOT count to 3 unless your character is being pinned. The reason being that McMahon had enough of you being the champion for years on end, and decided to take it away whether you liked it or not.
• In The Journeyman Project, you are a time traveller. At one point, you have to get a computer chip from a robot you disable in one era so that you can fool a retinal scanner in another. The problem is that there are a handful of chips you can take from the robot after you disable it, you can take them in any order, and taking a certain chip (which isn't the one you need to get past the scanner) will cause the robot to explode. There's no indication which chip does what, the game doesn't give any hints about how to solve the scanner puzzle, and there's no way to access the robot again after it's been destroyed. Good luck figuring out where you went wrong and pulling the chips out in the correct order after you restart!
• Companions Of Xanth: In the real world, before using the Xanth CD to begin the game proper, you must take the mustard from the refrigerator. You need it to defeat a hot dog half-way through the game.
• A few times near the end of Dark Corners of the Earth, which is especially unpredictibable since in most of the game it's impossible to do a mistake during the riddles. But it isn't as frustrating as it seems, because at these moment it is impossible to reach a savepoint.
  • On the ship, starting the engine requires the player to find a blowtorch, turn a specific wheel, fix a pipe with the blowtorch, turn another specific wheel. Not turning the right wheel will cause the engine to explode and kill the player.
  • On the Devil's Reef, a door near of the exit of the level must be reached within a timer. To trigger it, you have to put a jewel in a mechanism, run to the other door and put a red crystal in the opened claw in front of the door; when the timer expires, the claws close; if the red crystal is put in the claws the door opens, if not nothing happens. The first problem is that the timer can only be triggered once. The second is that near the triggering mechanism there are claws like the ones you have to reach; the ones near the triggering mechanism hold a green crystal and also open when you put the jewel in the timer's mechanism. The green crystal can be picked up by the player, but if it isn't in its claws when the timer expires the door won't open.
• In the Baldur's Gate series, you cannot talk with anyone who's hostile to you. To prevent the game from becoming Unwinnable by making a plot-critical (i.e. you need to talk to them to advance the plot) NPC hostile, the game will immediately kill you if you make them hostile. The methods differ from fire from the sky (Tethoril) to death by a game-breaking amount of magic missiles (Gorion) to spawning assassins that instantly kill you (Aran/Bodhi in their respective paths, Elthan). Most of these NPCs are almost impossible to kill on top of it.
• The Fire Emblem series has this built right into the main gameplay, for most of the series. The general formula for a campaign is that you fight one battle, then the next, and you are expected to level up your army and manage your equipment as you go. Your weapons break over time, and units who die in battle are lost permanently. If you lose too many units, or run out of weapons, or rely too much on the Jeigan Character and fail to level up your army properly, you may find yourself in an impossible situation.
  • The final boss of most of the games is only vulnerable to certain characters with certain equipment. Many of these characters can sometimes be missed, killed, or underleveled, and many of these items can be missed, lost, or broken. As an example, in the first game, you will have serious difficulty beating the final boss, Medeus, if you don't have Marth with his Falchion or Tiki with her Divine Dragonstone. Marth is the main character, so he cannot be missed and you get a game over if he dies, but it is quite possible to miss Tiki or lose her in battle. Getting the Falchion is also a fairly involved process.
  • In Fire Emblem Thracia 776, there are several chapters that require you to use a key (or a lockpick owned by a thief) to progress in the mission. Should the thieves be too tired to participate in the mission (or too DEAD for that matter) and/or you do not have any keys/lockpicks, you will not be able to finish that chapter (and by consqeuence, the rest of the game). In fact, you can encounter this situation as early as the third chapter if you did not do the Chapter 2 Gaiden mission(to recruit a thief that comes with a Lockpick) and unwittingly kill the only enemy that has a Door Key in Chapter 3.
    • Additionally, from chapter 8 onward in that same game, you are always required to select a minimum number of units in order to begin the chapter; should enough of your units either be exhausted, captured, and of course dead at that time, it is possible to actually lack the required numbers to even start the chapter - nevermind try to complete it.
  • Also in Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, there is a later mission where you are supposed to meet with an NPC to receive an item that allows its holder to negate the Plot Armor of the second story's penultimate boss and ultimately kill him, however, it is possible to complete that chapter without ever talking to this NPC, and the game will continue as if you had done so regardless. This will later bite you HARD when you finally get to the game's penultimate boss and you quickly realize that without that item in a unit's inventory, it is impossible to even attack the boss, let alone kill, and there's no way to replay a completed mission outside starting the entire campaign over.
    • That same chapter also has another item that is required to obtain in order to and get the final two missions and the good ending, that involves collecting all of the twelve Star Orb Fragments. Missing even one of the fragments denies you the chance to finish the whole story. And about half of them can easily be missed if you do not know exactly what to do beforehand.
• In the Facebook app Little Cave Hero there are various levels with underground springs which endlessly produces water. If tiles of water block a path and you can't destroy the source, or if for some reason you can't get the water to hit important water-switches, the level becomes unwinnable. What's worse is that you either have to pay real money or get a item from a Level 20 Facebook friend to be able to restart levels. Also troublesome is that (this being a Facebook game and all) you need to invite friends to get the tools necessary to clear many levels.
• In Sub Machine Extended, the second version of the original Submachine game, a puzzle was added where one of the four peices you needed appeared in a teleporter once you pulled certain switches and the power was on. However, it also retained the puzzle where you had to burn out the power in order to get another peice. Blow the fuses before you've found the former peice and it disappears again, so you're screwed. Mateusz Skutnik later decided this was a mistake, and in the current version the teleporter does not require power.
• In Brain Dead 13, if you run away from any of the "big three," then it's impossible to beat the game without restarting. You'll find out you've screwed up after you've crawled the castle a few times and start to suspect that it has no ending.
• That arcade game Crossbow featured unarmed adventurers walking from left to right across a screen, whilst bats, birds, scorpions, monsters, stalactites and arrows moved in on them and had to be shot by the player to ensure safe passage. The arcade cabinet featured a light gun shaped as an actual crossbow, meaning you could aim as quickly as you could move the weapon. The home versions used a crosshair moved by the keyboard or joystick - and in the Commodore version it moved at the same speed as all of the enemies. Accidentally move your crosshair past any enemy, and you can watch it crawl back with no chance to stop a crow or rat chewing through five humans in one go.
• The first Medieval Total War has an Year limit that ends the game if the year ends on a specific year. There's a scenario that can happen if you completed most of the provinces and a simple Mutiny on your armies happen, you're completely screwed and have to start over... either again, or an earlier save.
• Planescape: Torment can be made unwinnable if you anger the Lady of Pain twice; in this situation, she will always show up and kill you as soon as you leave whatever area you're in. However, the programmers were kind; the game will not let you save if you have done this, and will give you an error message stating that you have incurred the Lady's wrath and saving now would imperil your quest.
• Visual Novel Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors has a fake ending called the Coffin Ending. The Coffin Ending is exactly the same as the True Ending except that it just simply ends before you even get a chance to see the final room. The reason for this is because you are missing one condition needed to reach the True Ending: You need to get the Safe Ending, long story but it will make more sense. There is no indication of this within the game other than getting the True Ending because the game will notify you that you got both after finishing it.
• A mini-game form of this happens in Clue Finders. There's one mini-game in Search and Solve where you guess a few times, and then figure out which coordinates the spaces you have to hit are. The problem is, sometimes you can get unlucky and you either a) have all the spaces clustered into one spot (and your initial guesses are on the other parts of the map), or b) they're all spread out; and by the time you know which symbol and colour represents which row and column, you won't be able to win. It's going to take a lot more than just four.
• The MMORPG Trickster Online allows you to sell or accidentally drop (destroy) quest items necessary for the story quests. They cannot be replaced, petitioning a GM will only get the response 'well you shouldn't have done that'. Although the game is still playable about 1/2 of the single player content is forever lost and all the EXP those quests can give is gone.
• Visual Novels by Key Visual Arts are notorious as being unwinnable without a guide. Choices you make early on can produce a game over late in the game and with so many choices it's nearly impossible to get through any routes.
  • Probably most noteworthy is Nagamori's route in One: To the Radiant Season where you have to abandon her to be raped in order to get her true ending. Whether or not she's actually raped before you turn back to save her is up to interpretation.
• The US Army's version of Full Spectrum Warrior (used for NCO tactical training) includes a mission that is unwinnable, teaching noncoms that yes, you will lose battles and people will die. Defied Trope in the commercial release.
• The FMV game Titanic for PC has a number of these:
  • Going into the boiler room too early gets you shot. So the next time you start the game, you try going into the boiler room later on. It turns out that you've missed a crucial opportunity to get the Rubaiyat, the whole reason you were on the ship in the first place.
  • To finish the game, you need some way to get off the ship alive. Fortunately, there's a chap in the lounge playing blackjack with anyone who cares to throw their life away before it gets thrown away for them. He'll bet you the Mort card, the ticket that you need to get off the ship! What luck! But you have to bet a necklace^[6] which you also need to win the game, so if you lose that hand of blackjack, you're done, buddy.
• Ubisoft's WWII submarine simulator franchise Silent Hunter. In those where you command a german Uboat, no matter now many vessels you sink, Germany (fortunately) will always lose the war.
• Kronolog: The Nazi Paradox (Localized and released as Red Hell in Europe for obvious reasons) is just RIFE with these, mostly from failing to realize you need to acquire and keep certain items to solve later puzzles. Most notable is the zeppelin condom, hinted at in the elevator immediately after the second room in the game (which has the coin required to get the condom) and used to solve the second-to-last puzzle in the entire game. The 12-item limit in your inventory only makes this worse, as some items are not automatically discarded after their usefulness is gone, and unless you write down and remember EVERYTHING, you'll probably discard the condom to make space for other things, rendering the game completely unwinnable from that point on.
• Strife: Quest for the Sigil has many dead ends, including one that qualifies as Cruel bordering on Evil. One quest giver, Harris, gives you a quest to steal a chalice from the villainous Order's interrogation complex. If you do so the game becomes unwinnable, as he sends you to report to Governor Mourel (who normally is an NPC who gives out an essential quest a bit later). Mourel tells you you are under arrest and waves of Acolytes spawn in all over the city to kill you. There is no way of knowing this will happen and no turning back once you have the chalice. And that's just one dead end. Killing any NPC could potentially make the game unwinnable as that character would not be able to give out important quests or items.
• In Below The Root, your character is able to pick up a "wand of Befal" (a machete). Use it on an animal or human being, and your spirit strength goes poof, rendering the game unwinnable. Mind you, this is "tough" level at worst, and "Polite" if you actually read the books and knew that you were dealing with a society of pacifists and a book series where the major theme is the futility of violence.

Advertising

• Roddick starts off playing this straight, but then subverts it when he faces an opponent that "returns everything" - Pong.

Roddick: "My life is about finding a way to win."

Card Games

• Fluxx starts off with the rule card Draw One, Play One with no goal in play. At the beginning of the game, it's not possible for anyone to win—yet.
  • Zombie Fluxx introduced an un-goal, which is played just like a goal—but if it is met, then everyone loses.
• Klondike Solitare has many possible deals that are unwinnable; in some cases, there may be no valid moves besides dealing. The odds of dealing an unwinnable game are believed to be between 8.5% to 18%. The fact that the exact odds have not yet been determined has been called "one of the embarrassments of Applied Mathematics."
  • In comparison, some 99.999% of the possible FreeCell deals are solvable. Of the 32,000 standard games from Windows FreeCell, exactly one (#11982) is impossible to solve. In addition, entering -1 or -2 as the game number results in an unsolvable deal.
    • XP and onward have 1,000,000 deals. Out of those million, 8 are unsolvable.
    • Vista introduced games -3 and -4, which are very much the opposite.
  • Most types of solitaire are more like Klondike than like Freecell.
• Some hands of Blackjack. Example: If, in a two-person game, you have 16, the dealer has 12, and the next card is a 6, 7, 8, or 9, than you will lose no matter who gets the card (Someone will, since the dealer must hit with anything less than 17).

Gamebooks

• In the adventure book series Lone Wolf, in the second book there is a magic spear that can be missed. It is the only weapon you get that can kill Hellghasts, and you WILL encounter at least two of them. Even if you get it, there is an opportunity to give it to an ally so that he can survive guarding the mouth of a cave and allow you to continue. Sure enough, later on, if you did the right thing and gave it to him... then you made the book Unwinnable. He never shows up again. You are forced to face a Hellghast that proceeds to kill you because you lack any weapon that can harm it.
  • It is possible to get past this part without having the magic spear. But it requires picking the right skill from the very beginning, choosing the right path, and talking to mice. Guide Dang It! And in the original version, if you had the spear and gave it up, then you missed the chance to talk to the mice. The free online Project Aon version fixes this.
    • Unfortunately, no one is gonna write a guidebook for a gamebook—at least not a physical gamebook—as it would make the gamebook proper redundant.
  • The first three books were bad with this. In addition to the magic spear kerfluffle, book two becomes Unwinnable if you fail to get the vitally-important Seal of Hammerdale back in Ragadorn or if you sell it later for extra cash. Also in book two, if you don't have enough money to pay meals and lodging for the entire carriage journey, then you'll be forced to sleep in the stables at the last stop, where an assassin will get you in your sleep. In book three, you have to go downstairs instead of up at one point, or you'll never meet the captive wizard who has to help you in the final battle. There's also the important-looking magic gem that is evil and will kill you if you hold on to it too long—though if you do meet the captive wizard, then he will recognize it and get you to dispose of it shortly after you meet him. After this the series Grows The Beard, and these problems become rare—but there's still the occasional dick move. Book 4 hits you for one point of damage after winning the final battle.
  • Book 8. God Kai help you if you begin with that book. Unless you get CS-increasing armor, a high CS, the CS-increasing potion, Kai skills including Psi-blast and Weaponskill, the weapon you gain an advantage with using Weaponskill, and a string of 0s and 9s for the three (or four, depending on how you interpret the text) turns you get in the final battle, you're pretty much SOL.
  • A third example of near-Unwinnability comes in book 11. If you played through the books and brought the Sommerswerd to Book 10 (forcing you to retain it for 11—Lone Wolf is unable to do much of anything at the end of book 10, and storage is many miles away), then you're forced to fight three boss battles near consecutively. Even with full health, the Chaos Master has about twice your hit points and is nearly unbeatable. Now, even if you leave the sword behind, you still have to go through all three battles; but not having it with you nets you an even better sword for the Chaos Master battle and reduces the enemy stats.
• The Choose Your Own Adventure book Goosebumps: Escape from the Carnival of Horrors could be unwinnable; instead of having a game-over, it would cause you to repeatedly jump back and forth between two pages forever to simulate the player being trapped inside a hall of mirrors.
  • Another one about a Cave Spirit involved far more than remembering stories. You had to select which weapons or spells your character would be armed with. The hunter's path was always the hardest because your weapons had finite ammo or durability. If you used the wrong weapon at a certain time or didn't PICK the right weapon to use at a certain obstacle, then the game would be unwinnable.
    • To make matters even worse, you could actually lose the one weapon you needed for the ending by using it on the wrong obstacle early on. Plus, at the beginning of the hunter's path, there are two weapons you NEED to pick to get a good ending - fail to pick any one of them (you can only pick three of four weapons) and you'll meet an untimely end later on. [Hint: the weapon you can use only once is pretty much useless and use of it will spell instant death for you - unless you're on a certain story path, which only leads to two bad endings anyway.] The spellcaster's path is easier, as you can actually choose not to get into any problematic situations until you meet the Cave Spirit again, but you'd better steer clear of the park or else kiss the path's best ending good-bye (because you either will be turned into a frog/snake or destroy the one thing you need to defeat the Cave Spirit to escape).
  • In Inside UFO 54-40, the best ending is deliberately unreachable through regular gameplay (or, as the book puts it, by "making a choice or following directions").
• Ridiculously common in Fighting Fantasy books. Sometimes the book is merciful, such as when it tells you that you need to find "the man of numbers, or his book" or you'll fail, thus setting you looking for those things. Other times, the thing you need to progress is totally arbitrary.
  • The worst tests are usually in the final couple of rooms or areas - you tend to either take on a henchman of the Big Bad or similar situation and either use an item you may well have missed or used earlier, or perform a series of actions whereby one path in the chain allows success whereas the others are failures. Then the final encounter itself always relies on having retrieved a magic weapon/amulet/potion just to avoid dying immediately and for the right to fight them.
  • In the FF City of Thieves Gamebook, if you tried to scale a building you were trying to infiltrate, then you'd be faced by a gargoyle. You're told you need a magic sword to beat it. Say you have one, and the game chides you for cheating, saying you can't have one yet. Say you don't, and you're dead. Oh, and the alternative is to approach a guarded door.
    • Also from City of Thieves: The player needs to gather a compound to rub into the undead overlord's face, comprised of three items. Just before the final dungeon, you find out you need only two of the three, but you aren't told which ones. The final action in the book is choosing which two you combined. Two combos result in a one line death. The other results in a one line victory.
  • Talisman of Death: The player has to not only find the Talisman of Death but also carve the correct number on the back. A definite "Hell" situation because, if the wrong number is carved, all will seem fine until the final attack fails to be repelled. Immediate "Your Adventure Ends Here". And unless you find a very well hidden clue, a wrong number will be presented as the right number!
  • Moonrunner: If a particular item is not picked up and the Big Bad uses a particular random attack, then the book becomes unwinnable because of a hypnotically implanted cue that turns you into a monster in the final area.
  • Crypt of the Sorcerer: This one goes completely overboard. You have to follow a VERY narrow path to have even a remote chance of winning. Among other things, you need to smear yourself with a certain creature's blood to avoid death from a huge lizard monster in the middle of the book. The creature is met at the very beginning of the gamebook, and smearing yourself with the blood gives you a random chance of dying.
  • Rebel Planet: At one point, you break into an enemy armoury. There, you get the chance to take 2 out of 4 weapons. You must pick the right ones and guess which order to use them, or you die. There are no clues to help you.
  • Trial of Champions: This one contains a luck-based challenge forcing you to choose a chain of maneuvers against a blind kendo master, all of which are essentially random and lead to either total victory or end of game with no use of skill or items. The same book also has a wizard who requires you to have gathered exactly nine gold rings from random places as well as the code numbers to use them. Failure at any point is instant death.
  • The Big Bad confrontation in Return to Firetop Mountain requires the player to have gathered gold teeth with numbers on (Hope you don't have to forfeit a gold item in the eyeball-eating contest!), a series of tiny book pages saying how to use them, a magnifying glass to read the pages, a throwing knife to throw at a rat to avoid it stealing the tooth, and a successful skill roll to hit the rat. After all this, you finally get to fight Zagor, who may kill you if the print-based Quicktime Events didn't already.
  • Undoubtedly the most sadistic example from the entire Fighting Fantasy series comes in Creature of Havoc, a book where you play as a monster who begins the story with no free will. Your first few "decisions" are determined by dice rolls. Almost from the beginning, getting the wrong roll will make you miss the only item you can use to defeat the main villain. It is possible to play the book until the final confrontation and lose because you missed an item you could only obtain by 50/50 chance near the very start. To make matters worse, the weapon in question is still buried in a maze of very specific chapter selections, and you also have the option to use it in battle any time in your adventure, and it is destroyed after one use.

Film

• Amanda's traps in Saw III. Jigsaw actually decrees that she's not worthy of being his sucessor because her "games" were unwinnable, unlike his.
• WarGames: The computer thinks its playing a game called "Global Thermonuclear War". After analyzing all the scenarios, it finally concludes: "Strange Game. The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play."
• The Kobayashi Maru scenario from Star Trek is designed to be unwinnable, because it is a test of character. Needless to say, Kirk found a way to win by cheating.

Literature

• The Wheel of Time has a children's game called "Snakes and Foxes", played with dice and tokens on a simple board. Kids grow out of it once they realize it is Unwinnable without cheating. Heavy foreshadowing indicated that its unwinnability and the need for cheating would be important to the plot. This turned out to be correct.
• In Ender's Game, the Giant's Drink simulation was unwinnable because it wasn't really a game. Its only point was as a psychological gauge for each student. If they tried it a few times and gave up, good. If they kept on playing, despite having their avatar repeatedly killed, they had to be assessed for suicidal tendencies.
  • Then there was Ender, who broke the system and took a third option. Retconned in the sequel, though.
  • Arguably, the only real win is Bean's decision not to play at all.
• Catch-22 features the eponymous law, or regulation, or whatever. It is invoked by whatever abusive authority needs a heads I win, tails you lose argument. The prime example: Yossarian learns that insane fliers are kept from flying combat missions, as long as they ask to be grounded. But if you ask, that means you want to avoid combat, which is a rational decision, which means you are sane, and therefore you must fly combat missions.

Live Action TV

• Star Trek. Captains who go through Starfleet Academy have to, at least once before their graduation, take the Kobayashi Maru, an unbeatable scenario where, no matter what they do, they will be destroyed by an Alien Encounter. James T. Kirk was the only captain to beat this unbeatable scenario... by reprogramming the computer the night before.
  • One of William Shatner's own continuation novels had a new character bring up to Kirk about how he was the first to beat the scenario, and then immediately and unwittingly bring him down several pegs by revealing that everyone wins the scenario nowadays. It's become a programming challenge rather than a command one.
  • Star Trekker, a parody manga briefly published in the US by Antarctic Press until Paramount came down like a mountain on them, subverted this by having the main character (a Japanese captain) FIRE ON the Kobiyashi Maru. Being as that the Maru was a freighter loaded with dilithium crystals, the resulting explosion crippled the nearby Klingon cruisers. The captain was ordering a followup strike to take advantage of the Klingons' momentary confusion when Admiral Kirk himself kills the simulation and walks in to dress down the captain. She, in turn, explains succinctly that as Klingons do not take prisoners and saving the vessel was a clear impossibility, priority had to be given to saving her own ship...which Kirk dismissed, but later we see that it was really more a matter of not wanting anyone else to win the simulation.
  • It's a standard short story to see what every character has done. Variations include use of diplomacy (ship still dies but considered a win), cheesing the simulator physics (breaks as more ships will spawn), invoking ritual combat (you die, but everyone else lives), and in the case of Nog, bribery.
  • On Deep Space Nine, O'Brien and Bashir often spend their evenings playing a simulation of the battle of the Alamo in the holosuite, with themselves taking on the role of the doomed Texas soldiers. When asked why in the world they keep playing a battle scenario that's literally impossible to win, they explain that it's such an irresistible challenge precisely because it's unwinnable.
  • The episode "Court Martial" of the original series has a scene where McCoy comes across Spock playing computer chess. Spock reveals that, because he programmed the computer to play chess himself, he should not be able to win against it. His being able to beat it four times in a row is evidence that the computer has been tampered with.
• Knightmare had a No Backtracking rule, meaning it was easily possible for the teams to miss a vital clue or item. In a few cases, this led to an extremely hard Luck-Based Mission. Usually, it was only a matter of time before their mistake came back to kill them.
• The most famous game on The Price Is Right, Plinko, is technically close to unwinnable because the official rules only consider Plinko to be won if the full $50,000 is won. The only way to do that is to win all four additional Plinko chips (by correctly answering 'either/or' questions), and then to have every one of the five chips land in the center slot (out of nine) at the bottom of the pegboard. Even hardcore TPIR fans consider the game to be won if that slot is hit at least once, but Word of God disagrees. Nobody has won the game in the 29 years since it's been introduced, and nobody is likely to win it any time soon.
  • And one early pricing game, "Bullseye" (not to be confused with another identically-named pricing game) has the dishonor of being the only pricing game with a "true" 0% win rate. The player had seven chances to guess the exact price of a car, and would be told whether their bids were too high or too low. They tried pretty hard to make the game easier — spotting the contestant a $500 bidding range, rounding the price to the nearest $10 and even playing it for a sailboat instead — but none of the tweaks helped, and the game was gone only two weeks in.
    • Incidentally, if you know what you're doing, you could get the exact price (rounded to $10) if you can guess it within a $1,260 price range.
• On Minute to Win It, those who make it far enough are subjected to a game they call "Supercoin", where you have to bounce a quarter into the top of a water jug from a few feet away in 60 seconds to win $1,000,000. The producers have allowed people to play it for $1,000,000 after meeting special conditions (either by winning the "last man standing" episodes which award a guaranteed $100,000 to their winners, or being a lucky audience member during their "million dollar mission" during Season 2). No one has won, and the only couple to clear the $500,000 level were smart enough to walk away with the half million. A YouTube user has proven that part of the challenge is possible, the part involving bouncing the coin into the jug, but it took much longer than 60 seconds. Thankfully, losing on Supercoin would theoretically only drop you down to $250,000, which is still a good payout for a night's work.
  • Until they lampshaded the whole ordeal by putting a safe point conveniently at $500,000
• According to Jimmy McNulty ("The fucking game is rigged!") and Marla Daniels ("You cannot lose if you do not play.") amongst others, The system itself in The Wire is designed by those at the top to screw over those below them.
• On the Game Show Distraction, the winner must play an inverted Bonus Round to save his or her prize(s) from damage or destruction. If you were stuck with this endgame, your opponent started shoveling your £5,000 into the cement mixer immediately upon the round beginning, thus making it impossible to save your entire prize.
  • The "cash in the toasters" round was just about as evil - you had to answer five questions, each of which allowed you to save £1,000 from a toaster before it went up in flames. The first toaster pushed down represented the last question you were asked - even if you had gotten the first four with no problem, the money in the fifth toaster was likely half gone by the final question.

Newspaper Comics

• In one series of FoxTrot strips, Andy bought Peter some guarantee non-violent Video Games. Nice City, which is all about not killing anyone, becomes Unwinnable if you so much as step on an ant.

Tabletop Games

• Paranoia does this pretty much all the time. The public and private PC goals are routinely in direct conflict, so someone is going to fail at something (cue the Blame Game, which the debriefing is specifically designed to invoke). Occasionally a clever PC will find a way to get credit for appearing to succeed. Individually, goals tend to range from Failure Is the Only Option to merely ludicrously difficult (or "even if the GM can't think of a way to succeed, throw it at them anyway, they might come up with something").

Web Comics

• Erfworld features a turn-based strategy game designed to be unwinnable while following the rules - the only way to win would be to surprise the gamemaster through lateral thinking. Originally Parson wanted to try the game on his friends, until he was teleported into a wargame universe with the same setup but different mechanics...
• Xkcd used to provide the page image: a Tetris game where the bottom is curved, rendering it impossible to complete a line. The sequel makes up for it, though.
• It's implied that Homestuck's Jack Noir, being The Starscream of Derse, will always attempt to acquire the Black Queen's ring (even going so far as to allying with players). If he does get his hands on it, he will immediately proceed in making the session (nearly) unwinnable.
  • Prospit's war against Derse is unwinnable.
  • SBURB can be made unwinnable through a lot of ways. Someone in your player chain loses their discs? Unwinnable. Don't prototype your kernel before entering? Unwinnable. Don't enter the medium before the meteor timer runs out? Unwinnable. A player dies without a backup dream self? Unwinnable. Do something that deviates from the alpha timeline? Everyone is doomed and unwinnable.
    • Luckily, there are just as many ways to jump off a unwinnable game state, including an in-game reset button.
  • A lot of the rules with Sburb get changed around to the point it is more like a multiversal game of Calvin Ball with some unknown entity deciding which variation of the game they enjoy the most. Take the forgetting to prototype before entering your session. Universe B2 was required to do just that in order to win their session as B1's players found away to escape their Unwinnable game into the B2 game bringing with them the missing items, thus merging two Unwinnable games into one that is winnable. Rule 1 of Sburb is if you are told a rule exists Sburb will find a way to subvert said rule just to mess with you out of spite.

Western Animation

• In an episode of Family Guy, during a game night the cast was playing Cleveland Brown's choice of board game, Two Decades of Dignity, that purported to simulate the experience of African Americans. After being sent to jail for looking at a white woman, Peter asked how one was supposed to win, to which Cleveland replied, "You don't win; you just do a little better each time."
• The Robot Chicken sketch for the Hall of Memory game. The game is only winnable through trial and error, in which every error kills the previous contestant.

1. ↑ Andrew Plotkin's
2. ↑ Space Quest V gives you maximum points for doing everything at the first moment that it can be done; if you return for something later, then you can still win. You'll just get fewer points.
3. ↑ To make it worse, you get a one million dollar bill during a certain part of the game. If you go to the convenience store to get the big gulp with the million dollar bill, you will fill it up and stuff it in Hammerspace, but the clerk will tell you that she can't break a one-million dollar bill. You do not have the option of putting the drink back, and any attempt to leave the store will count as shoplifting, resulting in a game over.
4. ↑ the game will literally screw you over with a variety of "random" events that will kill you, without you being able to do anything about it, to simulate the danger of the cross-country trip
5. ↑ This one deserves special mention: you need to brand your mule, and the only place to do so is in the blacksmith's shop. If you go just a bit too far into the shop, your mule will run off and never be seen again, and the margin between being close enough to the forge to heat your brand and the point where your mule runs off is extremely small
6. ↑ There is actually a duplicate necklace, used to solve another puzzle in the game, which you can't bet