7 Innocent Looking Games That Are Secretly Super Messed Up 

I have one word for you - Bugsnax. Remember folks, you are what you eat.

I mean Doki Doki Literature Club is an obvious choice, but when it first came out I saw even people who knew about the twist shocked by how intense it got.

The double edged sword of using videos like these to find games you want to play, but having the twist spoiled instead of stumbling upon it naturally...

My favourite part of the Sonic Adventure stuff is that at the end, Tails rounds the game off with "all's well that ends well, right?" Tails, how many people died?!

Every Kirby game once you know the lore.

If you think Sonic Adventure is messed up, you should see Sonic Adventure 2, where a major plot point is a young girl getting murdered by paramilitary forces, causing her grandfather to go insane and trying to destroy the world. Additionally, when said grandfather's posthumous video log explaining how the world is about to end plays, the last few seconds make it painfully and traumatically clear that the recording you're watching is his last words before he's executed by firing squad.

What remains of Edith Finch, a lovely walking simulator about revisiting a childhood home.... then the frog.

Echo the Dolphin. It's a pretty game about a cute dolphin trying to find his missing friends. It's also surprisingly hard, sometimes has a bit of a survival-horror vibe going on and it turns out his friends are missing because a Lovecraftian monster sucked them through a blender.

Stardew Valley? Suicide? PTSD? Alcoholism? Abuse? All in a cute neat little package.

says something about how messed up duck hunt is that just seeing the dog fills me with dread.

One that comes to mind for me is Spyro: Year of the Dragon The game's story is basically that a sorceress has stolen a bunch of dragon eggs. Supposedly to "restore the magic" to her home world. However, eventually it is revealed that she plans on killing the baby dragons in order to make herself immortal. And to make it even more messed up, she outright says she doesn't "have to" kill them, doing so just makes it easier for her to then cut off the wings which is what she actually needs.

May I interest you in Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion? It starts out innocently enough, with the mayor making you his errand boy to pay off your taxes. But the further you get, the more you realize that something is seriously wrong in this cartoony little world. Not going to lie, I literally started crying during one of the boss fights. And no, I'm still not over it.

A lot of modern horror games seem to follow this "creepypasta" style of starting out innocent before becoming corrupted and horrifying. They usually have some mandatory warning though on its rating. Of course no one ever reads those or they see them as a "good sign" if they're a fan of that kind of thing. One of my favorite warnings is the DDLC "not for those easily disturbed" message because of the chance of it changing to something creepy.

Cooking Companions should be on this list. Super friendly, *super dark*

I'd forgotten my hatred for that fucking dog until now.

I was surprised not to see Hatoful Boyfriend on this list. Especially with the hidden story arc.

Little Misfortune is another one that few people point out. A friend did tell me to play it and still regret it to this day.

How do you not have Bugsnax on this! You couldn't have more of a contrast between the cute start and the horror movie at the end.

Even though it was a flash game, I'm surprised Can Your Pet? isn't on here. That was my first experience with a cute game that was secretly dark. You raise a cute chicken and dress it up and play with it and then BOOM! Childhood ruined.

I've been playing a Animal Crossing like game called Cozy Grove that on the surface is cute and fun, but when the setup is that I'm some kind of Cub Scout sent to an island to help out a bunch of friendly, personable ghosts, things get pretty dark when you get into the backstories of how they died and why they aren't moving on. Also the implications that I can't get off the island and my Scout Leader has left me for dead, too. But hey, let's just collect the resources, cook recipes, catch bugs and fish, do little daily quests, don't mind all that.

Pokemon Gen 1. I don't think any Pokemon fan who's played red, blue or yellow can ever forget Lavender Town's Pokemon cementary Lavender Tower, the implication that you might be responsible for the death of one of your rival's Pokemon, and the encounter with the ghost of the orphaned Cubone's mother, who was killed by Team Rocket. (Most succeeding generations have something like that too. Like Gen 2's origin story for Suicune, Entei and Raikou.)

Sky: Children of the Light. Got the simplest and most adorable characters with kids running around floating on clouds but it's actually like that concept of hell where one day is on a forever loop.

Honestly, NO idea how this list could be made without Doki Doki Literature Club. The LITERAL DEFINITION of an unexpectedly dark game.

That Elite Beat Agents mission was definitely a twist. I don't think I failed it to get that photograph of him admiring himself that much. :P

I will never not sing my praises for Beacon Pines, it's just so charming literally playing in a storybook, but sheeeeeesh does it get dark at points, sometimes with zero buildup. Criminally overlooked, I do hope to see the oxbox or oxtra teams talk about it.

I dunno if this counts, but Zelda: Links awakening? Didn’t realize it til I got much older but to leave the island you have to wake up the wind fish, and you learn by waking the wind fish you destroy/erase the existence of the island and everything on it, as if they were nothing more than a dream

Bonnie's Bakery is a good example of this since it looks like an innocent cooking game at first, but it is actually super dark.

Bugsnax messed my daughter up. Sure, its all bright and cheery, and nearly impossible to lose, but that last 30 mins and the ending though...

5:35 That's the bad option? The man's a stud. I was expecting it to be something upsetting like a pic of him having had an affair or something.

13:30 Well, I wasn't expecting a Corridor Crew collab, but close enough. I'll take it.

There's a game called Pony Island, which is absolutely just a happy little arcade game where you play as a pony. Definitely nothing weird going on in that one.

Rime. At first you think it's a whimsical adventure of a young boy on a colorful island full of puzzles. Then you get snippets of the boy's past, seemingly losing his father in a storm before crashing on the island. It's just a little ways before the end when you realize that the boy is the one who was lost in the storm, and that he actually drowned, leaving his grieving, widowed father all alone. While the game was clearly inspired by the likes of Ico, it hides the darker stuff under brighter colors and lacking any kind of combat.

The Bunny Graveyard and Doki Doki Literature Club.

Watching the intro to the Lucy mission after playing a bunch of goofy fun missions, "Aww, going to help Lucy find a girlfriend for her Teddybear!" Intro progresses, "Right? Right?!..." tears.

Seeing Elite Beat Agents on a list makes my heart sing

Splatoon is actually pretty dark in a world building sense- post apocalyptic world where humans went extinct, cephalopods evolved to go on land but the world continues to flood and land is running out causing fights to start over turf- and that's just what i remember off hand from the first game

I am horrified that Bugsnax is not on this list

I mean, if you name your planet Sunder, it's on YOU when it gets broken to pieces. Also, Sonic Adventure includes: Dr. Robotnik/Eggman flying his Egg Carrier over Station Square to terrify the population (hits different after 9/11), firing a missile at Station Square, and the whole story for Gamma.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It presents itself as a fun, light-hearted, whimsical adventure in the beginning levels, albeit one with a serious goal: finding a magical spring to cure your dad. And then ... and then ... AND THEN ...

I have two words for you: Naughty Bear. You're literally a teddy bear in a world filled with teddy bears and your objective is to basically kill them all, one method of which includes DRIVING THEM TO DEFLUFF THEMSELVES. Sure it's not like a super good game and it gets repetitive after a (short) while, but it's the first game I thought of when I saw the title of the video. Though DDLC is definitely a fantastic choice as well that, as others have pointed out, should have been included

If only "Emergency Call Ambulance" had Madam Web performing cpr on that kid in the back of the ambulance. Jack would be in safe hands.

Fun fact: The Sonic Adventure final boss was actually made into a special figure skating level in Mario & Sonic Winter Olympic Games. Unfortunately it's a different soundtrack but the boss fight is well made. I think this game is only on the WII so good luck finding it 😊

Tails: "All's well that ends well, right?" FastestThingAlive: "THE CITY'S BEEN FUCKING DESTROYED!!!"

Imagine your first day as a medical staff in the back of an ambulance and your ambulance driver decides it’s cool enough to catch air on a hill.

I think Stray is like this. You start off with the attitude of being a curious cat and then find out you’re in a world completely devoid of humans. And the worst part about it is the actual cat you play as knows nothing of what’s going on, he just wants to get out of the city. Only the human player really knows what’s going on.

Advanced Wars: Days of Ruin is much darker imo. Part of the plot is that it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland. And better yet, there's a disease you're trying to cure where flowers grow within you, weakening your body, before bursting out and causing death like a pretty botanical xenomorph

Bro duck season is absolutkey terrifying.I was like,”when is this gonna get scary? I heard about-AAAAAAAAAAAAA

I saw the list and immediatly frowned because Omori wasn't on it- Omori is practically the poster child for games that look cute and wholesome on the surface but are actually really messed up 😂

Eversion is an old example of a game pulling a dark twist early on. It's a platformer where you "evert" at certain spots in each level to flip to new dimensional layers to progress. As you get further along though, the layers get progressively more dark and depressing. There's a very good reason it opens with a disclaimer for people of a nervous disposition.

We Behold What We Become, Happy Wheels, Poppy Playtime. They fit this title.

I know it's regular OXbox, but Ellen really should have been the one to talk about cats 😔

Literally any game in the Mother series. Snes Mother was probably the least messed up but does have a party member get killed partway through depending on the version you play. Earthbound: Giygas Mother 3: Literally everything Mother 3 if you are somehow unaware.

Battleblock Theater was such an underrated gem, glad to see it get mentioned here! PS: The Narrator in that game better have gotten paid well; he went so over-the-top for this game

I think the Viva Piñata games would qualify.

Tunic deserves a place in this list. Significantly more imprisoned tortured souls than the average cute puzzle game.

It is still in Demo right now, but I will tell you, Normal Fishing is not what it appears to be.

I can't believe you left out Bugsnax. You turn cute little fruits, veggies and other delights into bugs, then catch and feed them to townspeople who sprout these snacks all over their bodies. Would that make them cannibals? The biggest innocence buster tho, has to be Pokemon. Capture cute animals, keep them prisoner, and force them to fight to the death and if you tire of them, give them to a dude who makes em into candy! Great fun for children everywhere. Thanks for the fun.

If you think Sonic Adventure jumps into the grim, consider Sonic Adventure 2: it starts with several levels of the military rampaging through inhabited cities, halfway through the moon gets shot in half while a little girl watches a countdown to the end of the world, and by the end we see a man so thoroughly broken by the loss of one grandchild that he willingly sentenced all life on earth to die, including another of his own grandchildren.

1. Maybe the dog that follows u into the ER is the doctor maybe called doggie howser or Dr D. House (the D stands for Dog)

Bonnie's Bakery 😰 cute little bakery mini game that takes a very..very dark turn

Sonic Adventure 2 did something similar when the true ending involved a mentally broken scientist who five decades prior rigged an entire space station to collide with the Earth to kill off all life on the planet out of sheer grief and vengeance. His diary was absolutely chilling to listen to as a kid.

Well great, now "You're The Inspiration" is back in my head. I swear OXboxtra videos feature the Elite Beat Agents Christmas mission just often enough to spite me.

How about To the Moon? The game glosses over how messed up Johnny's mom is so quickly that you likely won't put the whole picture together until after multiple playthroughs. Basically, her parental favoritism was so bad that, when she accidentally ran over Jowy (her favorite son), she forced Johnny into a drug-induced amnesia so that she could gaslight him into thinking that he never had a brother and condition him into being a replacement for Jowy.

Oh my God, I had Elite Beat Agents as a kid. I loved it, but I stupidly sold all my DS stuff a long time ago. So my wife bought it for me again a couple Christmas' ago, and I was playing it on Christmas next to her. My wife, whose father died when she was very young. Yeah, by the end of the song, she was bawling and I felt like a total asshole

Way back in the day I played a Zelda-esque browser game called Seedling, in which a boy is created from the wind by an oracle in order to find a seed to replace a dying tree. It's very charming and nostalgic right up until the ending when a character chews you out for charging into dungeons and mass murdering all the creatures there just because they were in the way of you getting the seed, and if you don't go out of your way to get the good ending the oracle straight up destroys you once you've served your purpose.

1:22 this Ring Cam Ambulance footage has me crying😂 .. and concerned😆

Cozy Grove certainly has some messed up elements. While it seems like Animal Crossing, its story is much darker. As a new spirit scout you're crashing with your boat on the wrong island. Are the adults helping? Noo! Why would they?! It's never even mentioned if your parents were told that you've been shipwrecked... And it takes about 90 days to repait your vessel. Your task as a spirit scout is to help the ghosts of bears to move on. So you're alone, on the wrong island, with much more ghosts than your level of experience. And their problems are tough: guilt from various issues like alcoholism, corruption, anxiety, etc. The worst story is the one from the first bear you meet, and it's one of the last stories I pieced together. She was also a scout and send to the island many years ago. But she failed to help one specific bear there, who was just content with the way things are for him. So she actually died on the island. So creepy. Overall I love this game and how it handles these dark topics; how you help the bears to learn and to move on. But not getting help from the scout organizers and some of the stories are really tough to handle when you think too hard about them.

Halo: Combat Evolved, perhaps? It's not exactly "innocent," per-se, but the introduction of the Flood quickly turns the gung-ho alien war in the first half into practically survival horror as the ring gets overrun by the all-consuming parasite in the second half.

So happy to see Elite Beat Agents mentioned! Even though that mission was seriously depressing...

The thing that went through my head was the Rockudrama mode added in Rock band 4’s rivals dlc. You go from having a goofy adventure becoming famous from performing in front of one fan to hitting a sad low of a failing band.

As long as you feel hopeless, it still has hope in it, and you can rearrange the letters to spell peeslosh!

IIRC, the arcade version of Duck Hunt DOES allow you to do shoot the dog in one of the stages, but it's treated like a Wily Coyote moment. You are chastised for shooting the dog because even if it teases you for missing two ducks with three shots, he IS on your side.

The Subcon Forest area of a Hat in Time was pretty dark with the nooses, suicidal spirits and Vanessa's whole deal

I like that these weren't all indie horror (like I was expecting and love). There's a chance you'd get these and NOT expect horror!

Sonic Adventure. I genuinely remember being blown away by the graphics so mental to think how far theyve come on since.

The opening to Sonic Adventure actually shows part of the flooding scene to set the tone before the song kicks in. So many of us expected it to get messed up. What we didn't expect was the extent of the damage. Nor the other messed up things in the story. There was literally a Chao genocide, and a murder-suicide!

The Advanced Wars reminds me of Fire Emblem Sacred Stones. Being GBA as well (and I think the same developer) it likewise has bright color palette as you war across the continent. Then 7 or 8 chapters in a baddie kidnaps a family and you try to save them from a giant flesh eating spider. If you do nothing, you can let the dad watch the spider devour his 2 daughters right in front of him. Its quite cheerful! And then later on a traitor makes love with his reanimated dead wife's corpse...

I guess it’s because it was a browser game but I was shocked I didn’t see Can Your Pet on here lol

Similar to Anachronox, Star Ocean: The Last Hope (Which admittedly is set in a future where the Earth was ravished by World War 3) seems to be a relatively run of the mill JRPG time with a protagonist called Edge Maverick, his cool rival and put upon love interest/childhood friend, and anime catgirls. That is until some sort of space anomaly sends you back in time to 1950s Earth, where the technology present in your spaceship allows a mad scientist to create a device that obliterates the planet. It's quickly revealed this Earth was an alternate universe's, but this obviously does not improve the protagonist's mood.

Tails: “All’s well that ends well!” Me: The entire city is flooded and people are drowning.

Hands up if you also grew up with Happy Tree Friends. ;D

For two decades I thought that I was literally the only person alive who remembered the game Anachronox I bought it at a garage sale in like 2004 and really enjoyed it and since then have never once seen it mentioned by anyone else in person or online

as soon as I saw the agents, I knew EXACTLY which episode you were going to be talking about. Everyone who's ever played the game/is a fan already knows. also everyone cries after hearing that song outside of eba because of the emotional trauma that was caused. so glad to see them getting some rep though!

Thank you guys for consistently putting out videos EVERY Thursday with such feel good vibes that even depression looks nice...(it's not)... love you all❤❤❤

Advance Wars 1 and 2 never made sense story/tone wise. Still very enjoyable though to play. Best example in the first game is perhaps that you claim that you're "just passing through" Japa.... Yellow Comet. Meanwhile, Orange Star happily plonks down their headquarters, captures local cities, military bases, airfields and ports. "why do they attack us?!" At the end of the first game, Andy and Eagle just decide to have a "friendly" match just for fun. Hundreds if not thousands of soldiers can end up dying just for the sake of "having a friendly".

My time at Portia has dire implications to what happened

I'll add in the criminally-little-known Ittle Dew games. They're cute Zelda-likes that are loaded with puns, but will randomly veer into brief bloody violence before whiplashing right back to harmless and cute. There are occasional VERY creepy areas as well, and the second game straight-up goes full Lovecraftian if you find some absurdly well-hidden secret areas.

Two things: First, in the Sonic Adventure portion, I'm surprised you didn't mention that in Tails' story (which happens in parallel to Sonic's) Eggman tries to LEVEL STATION SQUARE WITH A MISSILE! And that actually happens just BEFORE the city floods. Second, my contribution is Custom Robo for the Gamecube. It starts out as a goofy game where you use tiny robots to fight other tiny robots, usually piloted by criminals. Then there's a murder. From there, you find out that the reason you live in a dome is because it's the only habitable spot on the planet after an apocalypse and the government has been covering it up for the safety and mental wellbeing of its citizens. Now the murderous evolving robot that nearly wiped out humanity has been revived and wants to finish the job. Fun times!

Suggestion 1: Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter (Spoilers ahead!) This sweet little DS game is a colorful, vibrant game where you can draw your creations to life in a wonderful sidescrolling platformer with an awesome pixel art style...! Mostly! You know that whole trend of people making up dark, edgy fan theories saying, "this game is actually a coma dream"? This game is /actually/ a coma dream. Nothing could have prepared younger me for, after defeating 'the bad guy', thinking I won and saved the world... Only to then have all the lovable cast talking about how it's the end of the world and all of them end up accepting their fates, steeling themselves, then telling you (the creator) that 'they're ready', and then having you MANUALLY PRESS THE SCREEN TO END THE WORLD... /THEN/ suddenly the cute pixel art is juxtaposed to "harrowing realistic chiaroscuro artwork of a family getting into a brutal car crash after going home from the carnival, and the one human character turns out to be the youngest child who wakes up in the hospital with plushies that resemble two main characters that he got from the carnival. (While a surprisingly good/sweet song plays.)" Google the ending scene. Shit is WILD.

Hey, the human mind is complicated and likes to have you seemingly blow up at something small rather than the real issue. During the last story, you can get a darkly humorous line by the hotel proprietor as long as you go there before you get close enough to Big's house when that area becomes a cutscene trigger.

Came here for Doki Doki Literature Club. Which should be all 7 places on this list.

Maybe I’m just obsessed but kinda surprised at the lack of Undertale? Even on the true pacifist route, you suddenly have to go into the secret laboratory and fight amalgamates which make you question what’s even happening anymore. They’re so depressing and terrifying if you think too hard about them. Then there’s the whole ‘the player is an actual character outside of Frisk or Chara’…

My understanding of the Toy Box mission was that Lash just did some heavy investing in the infrastructure to redecorate the place in accordance to her bizarre sense of aesthetics. Everything is just haphazardly placed all over and there's no rhyme or reason to it. They never actually state that anything is straight up destroyed.

Was trying to work out which tragic thing in Anachronox you were going to do. I actually found Fatima's story was more emotional than the death of a whole planet

“Presumably, back to Hell.” Jesus, Andy, who hurt you?

0:50 Hah! That bullet-cam was actually pretty cool😁

They actually forgot shipwrecked 64

10:18 - Whoever does the narration in this game has just got another fan.

a game that came out today also fits this theme perfectly "Another crabs treasure" which is a bright and colorful comedy souls-like in which in the extended tutorial area you have to kill all the npcs you've met as they have all been taken over by pollution while you were away on a quest.

Elite Beat Agents mentioned. Hell yeah