7 Times You Made the Game Unwinnable With Your Nonsense 

Skyrim - I've heard there's this thing called the 'main quest' that lets you beat the game, but I'm too busy being a magethiefassassinvampirewerewolfwarrioralchemistblacksmithbardstealtharcher

Anakin calling someone else a child murderer is hilarious irony.

There's a reason it doesn't immediately say "mission failed" on that 007 level. You can still shoot the glass (there are two guys behind a pillar in the next room) and it'll force the npcs to come investigate your gunshots. They can still open the door for you from that side. It's a crucial item that computer, but not 100% necessary to finish the level, hence it not saying mission failed.

There's a name for this trope. As opposed to "unwinnable by design", for your scripted boss losses, "unwinnable by mistake" for when the developers made an oopsie, and this: "unwinnable by insanity".

This was so common in 90s adventure games that it basically turned into a running gag. Like King's Quest V where eating a pie you were given early on made you unable to defeat a yeti that charged at you later on leaving you in a continual loop of dying over and over. Or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where if you didn't buy a sandwich and feed it to the dog at the start of the game, you'd get stuck at a point near the very end of the game. Somehow it seems that food was a key element in almost every adventure game of the era.

This list can't possibly be complete without... (watches entire video) No, nothing I can come up with will be better than Mike as Qui-Gon 47.

In the old game Myst, you spend hours and hours solving puzzles, rescuing pages to complete some books, finally find your way behind the fireplace, and… accidentally click so that you enter the last world with no way out. Even Atrus is like “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??!”

I'm so glad he mentioned the slide jump in Castlevania. If you pay close attention, the sprite actually "twists" as it pushes off the ground with its arms now raised over its head from the push. It's a crazy detail, but it's there. So to answer your question as to how he slide jumps, he pushes off the floor with his hands moments after starting the slide so the momentum keeps him going forward as he moves up.

In Divinity Original Sin 2 there's a pair of NPCs who have been turned into cows. They're cured by being given a potion, but apparently if you have one of your characters drink the potion they permanently turn into a cow.

It's not often that the phantom menace tie-in game comes up, but whenever it does I get the melancholy longing to play it again.

I feel like Andy's inner chaos telling him to do crazy things voice is also Mike. Jane's is the eternal voice of Cthulu

In the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, characters marked as essential can, unlike in the following games, be killed rather than knocked unconscious. If you do this however, you will render the game's main quest impossible to complete. You can still continue playing however.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate Mike's "Boned, James Boned" pun? Ellen would be so proud.

"There is no weapon like no weapon" is somehow a very nice and pleasing line to hear

I stopped playing DC Universe Online because I went in to the final story mission with one set of weapons. For my class, my weapons wore away with use, so by the time I got to the FINAL final boss, they'd broken. All my skills and damage output involved these two things. I couldn't abort the mission, restart, escape, or even repair. I'd die and be at that chamber using nothing but harsh language. Believe me. There was harsh language.

The brilliant thing about Elvira 2 is that you would think they'd end the game after you lost your hands but the game taunts you into just trying to keep going.

8. Putting it all behind a $110k paywall.

Playing Infamous (the original), an RPG was heading for me, so I jumped. This resulted in a buggy blast that propelled me to the next island borough, which I hadn't unlocked, yet. As a result, the drawbridge wasn't lowered, so I couldn't get back to where all my missions were, and no missions, NPC's or enemies were populated on the new area, so there was nothing to do but load up my last save.

This most often happened to me while trying to find secrets in games and, instead, managing to trigger some type of glitch (trapped in walls, falling through floors, getting trapped in a flower planter in assassin's creed, etc). Usually, I was also lucky enough to have the game save at that exact point, as well. I remember this being most noticeable in Halo games.

Ankin: I won't help a murder like you Fan: oh that is rich

9:01 I think that softlock was intentionally left by the developers, because you can softlock yourself in a similar fashion in the first Monkey Island game by also doing stupid stuff. I really loved the first game, so I tried to explore every single facet of the game. In one of my saves I tried speedrunning the game and realised that you can complete the forest treasure puzzle without buying the map to the X marking the spot. Because the forest puzzle was completeable even without the map (there wasn't a trigger that unlocked the path to the treasure, it was available from the start). So I merrily completed all the puzzles on the starting island and reached the part with the ship without buying the map. Then… I softlocked myself, because the map is an essential part of the game. You have to set the map on fire and use it to light something else. Nothing else I had would burn like the map, not even the stack of brochures I had 😑 Best part is that you can actually complete the forest puzzle without the map on your first playthrough, simply by being stubborn enough and trying all the paths, even if you get lost 10,000 times (I know, because I completed the forest without the map, thankfully though my hoarder tendencies forced me to buy the useless map).

One that comes to mind is the Mars mission near the beginning of Mass Effect 3. At the very end, Dr Eva charges at you and you have to shoot her with a pistol several times. The only problem is that if you are on new game+ and equip certain pistols, it’s essentially impossible to kill her in time. If you fail, it just reloads this moment. I seem to recall the only solution is to restart the entire game from scratch.

In the original Deus Ex, there were parts where there was no invisible wall to stop you sometimes. You could sneak into the triad complex before earning your way in, at which point the triad leader becomes permanently hostile toward you and you are no longer able to advance the plot. 🤷🏻‍♂️

ALWAYS love the Oxbox and Xtra crew, but Mike REALLY knocked the comedy out of the ball park in this one! Touché, Sir!

I once managed to screw myself over in Halo 3 during the level where you land on the Ark, when the frigate lands and you get the vehicles. I took the Scorpion and, for a laugh, decided to drive it off the nearby cliff with Master Chief and his fellow soldiers still on board. Unfortunately, that was the moment when the game decided to create a checkpoint, and I was stuck in an endless loop of my Scorpion plunging into the abyss whilst I was trapped inside. Whoops

There's another way to get stuck in Goldeneye. If you killed Boris in the control level, Natalya will refuse to help you further getting you stuck. Killing Boris is generally not recommended in any level you run into him.

Mike's negative self talk was all too familiar. For what it is worth, I love you!

Actually, in Goldeneye in the Facility level security guards will eventually come for you from beyond that door, opening it for you. So you can still get through that door even if you destroyed the computer.

You can't convince me they didn't write this whole episode just to set up that perfect Jamed boned joke

I would just like to point out that throwing crosses were a real medieval weapon, and were evidently popular enough that one Italian city-state actually explicitly banned them

Another vote for Morrowind-you are allowed to off anyone as long as you can get away from the guards, and if you like dicking around it’s very easy to accidentally murder an essential character, as the game only tells you after the fact. (In Oblivion they learned to make the essential ones unkillable with a reticle icon to drive the point home.)

In Skyrim, one of the first things you have to do is jump from a tower to the second floor of a nearby inn. Miss that jump, and the whole game just refuses to progress, as you walk around the burning village with your hands tied forever.

Jumping over the flag in the original super Mario Bros. Took me ages to manage that only to find out I was soft locked foreverrrrr

Dead Rising actually has a sticker on the front of my 360 copy saying "No connection to that other thing I clearly have a connection to"

The line, "The galaxy's *greatest* hero," was delivered amazingly. I laughed, I cried, I kicked my cat, and pissed off my neighbor. Beautiful!

Hilariously, you can doom yourself in Oblivion...just by playing it as it tells you. When choosing your class and what you are generally good at during the beginning of the game, if you pick things you want to be good at (for example, archery), your archery skill will level up SLOWER than other skills, and enemies' will quickly outpace you when you eventually level up and the difficulty will gradually get higher and higher as you play. The way to prevent this is to pick skills you don't want to use, and then never touch them.

I once got caught in a death loop in Fallout 3, with only the auto save. Let this be a lesson that manual saves are still helpful!

In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, if you attack Mankar Cameron at the Shrine of Dagon when you first meet him, you can delay him going through the portal to Paradise. At first, nothing seems off. But as you progress through the quest and eventually reach Paradise yourself, Cameron isn't here waiting for you. Since you can't kill him, the realm is never destroyed, so you're softlocked.

I’m sure Monkey Island 1 had the opposite problem, where you could spend all of the pieces of 8 you needed in a useless vending machine one at a time until you didn’t have enough left for the rest of the plot, with no way to gain more. Sidenote, Romero’s estate did sue Capcom over Dead Rising, but lost because the Judge didn’t believe the game had the nuance, themes and ‘artistic merit’ of the film…

In Pokemon Red/Blue you can spend all your money before picking up the HM in the Safari Zone. You have to pay to enter the Safari Zone.

So "Unwinnable By Insanity" as TV Tropes puts it?

As soon as I saw the Qui-gon thumbnail I knew you were doing the Episode 1 game. That game is phenomenal in my opinion. Like you say you can kill ANYONE, and there's usually dialogue for it too. Besides that I thought it was alot of fun oddly enough

My first game for PS, Resident Evil 2. I shot everything and used health thinking there will be more or it will respawn. I was so wrong and today, still stuck in a save room.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Andy will work that "What is a man?" speech from SOTN into every. single. video he can.

In Divine Divinity, you're allowed to drop any items you deem useless to the ground. That includes items that later turn out to be essential in the main questline. I may have learned it the hard way.

Playing the painful experience of two worlds as a child and dropping quest items in a shed in the woods only to come back when I realised and find they had de spawned 🤦‍♂️

SO happy to see Phantom Menace on this list! One of the best levels ever that Mos Eisley level, absolutely underated classic! Worth mentioning that if you kill enough Jawas they eventually go totally ham on you with rapid fire missile launchers and personal shields.

You don't know pain until your non-gamer friend turns up at your house and kills the firekeeper in Dark Souls while you're out of the room when you're about 3/4 of the level needed to complete it :|

In metal gear rising: revengeance, as soon as you get full control of Raiden, you can try out the fancy cutting tech on the nearby stairs, which you can theatricaly cut to pieces and block your way forward.

The first Monkey Island had a similar moment where you could throw any item you thought you didn't need into the brew to get you to the Island. This included the brochure on "How to get ahead in navigation" which you DID need to get the Navigator's head

I don't know if I was truly stuck, but in the first Devil May Cry you can leave the library after defeating the witches and not pick up the shotgun and it doesn't reappear. There's those floaty guys underwater that you have to fight at one point to progress and I'm pretty sure the only way to beat them is with the shotgun.

"Do it. Just do it." - Mike debating going on a killing rampage in a Hitman 3 stealth challenge

The fact that Mike’s inner saboteur only took two tries to convince Mike to sabotage himself lmao

My word of advice to anyone playing Dark Souls: you get free levels and all the loot by killing the merchants in the Firelink Shrine. Trust me.

I remember actually enjoying the phantom menace tie in. I recall the Darth Maul fights being tough and then discovering for the last one you could just run left as soon as you entered the room. He just stood there whilst you shot him.

You could make at least two whole new videos under this premise about Morrowind and Daggerfall.

The first time I played a Fire Emblem game, it was in Japanese, which I only had one year of learning under my belt, and didn’t realize it had a permadeath mechanic. I think I got well over half way through the game before I got into a battle I couldn’t win. No matter how I tried, it was completely unwinnable. And because I didn’t make multiple saves, my own choice was to quit or start over from the beginning.

Daggerfall can be completed without meeting Lady Magnessen. Desptie what her last letter says, skipping the meeting has no impact on the rest of the main quest. You'll get more letters from other NPCs at specific character levels

You could make countless lists of Sierra games, with actions such as forgetting to grab an item, grabbing the wrong item, using an item too early, using an item too late, going to a location too early, going to a location too late, talking to someone, not talking to someone, touching something, not touching something, just to name a few.

In grim fandango out of Curiosity i left the scythe on the pantry doors in rubacava in part 2 before leaving. When i started part 3 i didn’t have it and had to reload xD

I’m a simple woman, I see Qui-Gon Jin in the thumbnail, and I click it.

I thought polish your pirate leg was something else

Honorable Mention: Fable: The Lost Chapters. While journeying towards Jack of Blades, it's possible to use your guide as a sacrifice to proceed further. The game is still winnable, however this is because the plot intervenes to save you; pointing out directly to the player that, if it didn't intervene, you would have just done a very pointlessly-evil thing.

Kid: ''Who are you gonna murder next, mister?'' You: *grins evilly*

Gotta love at 6:26 where Daggerfall says that the Spider "just" died. How about _any_ classic Sierra adventure game? I can't think of a good standout example, but unlike Lucasarts' games, Sierra design ethos did NOT protect you from getting "softlocked" into an unwinnable scenario due to not having picked up some key item before reaching whatever obstacle or puzzle requires it to proceed.

I never knew you had to press the computer button to open the door in facility. I used to get through there by attracting the guards by firing the kf7 soviet

Dead Rising bonus way to lose: not have the right TV. I got a 360 when it launched, had my regular CRT TV, and I had no idea I was supposed to do anything except run around and have fun until the game decided to say "game over" because I couldn't read anything that scrolled on the bottom of the screen.

Dead end games, Sierra's specialty. You could make a whole series off of ways to dead end your game from the King's Quest series alone

Back when I was playing Everquest players had an ability that let them change their respawn point. Considering that this was a game where you needed to get your equipment from your previous corpse, being able to change your bind point so you didn't have to travel a long distance after death was a good thing. Unless you went into a dungeon you'd never been to before and changed your respawn point to a room that was clear when you first entered it but it actually has several monsters in it usually (surprise!). Then when you died later exploring said dungeon, you revive completely naked and unarmed in a room full of monsters similar to the one that killed you with all of your equipment. Which leads you into a situation called a death bind loop. FYI: Everquest has this system where you lose xp every time you die, and you do lose levels if you die often enough. So the only thing you can do is crash your game, log back into your account on a different character and politely beg that a GM takes mercy on you and moves your character to somewhere safer. Getting your lost xp and stuff back? GM won't help you with that.

What about Mass Effect where you can destroy door panels that inhibit your progress moving forward! If you saved after you destroyed a door panel you were SCREWED

Losing your hands to the piranhas is hilarious

3:45 and at this point, I realized this is missing Jane. That entire section about Elvira is obviously for her, the Mistress of the Dark Xbox.

I don't remember which Monster Hunter game for the PlayStation Portable it was. But if you attack the cats on the first mission of one of the PlayStation Portable's copies of monster Hunter, Nobody will ever be able to progress through the game, as it places a mark on your system. Not just a mark in your save file. But a mark on your PlayStation Portables firmware. And the Mark is on the actual firmware, and not the safe area that resetting wipes. But a mark on the actual base file system. Only way to get rid of the mark is to either buy another PlayStation Portable. Or get factory install data that they formatted new systems with back when it was still in production. Edit: Not knowing at the time that the cats were an ally, I screwed myself out of playing the game.

Apparently in the orginal Link's Awakening, it is possible to clear a jump across some water in the Angler's Keep to access a locked door. The problem is that you need the ability to swim to get through the rest of the dungeon, and you also lost the key needed to access the flippers. (The remake fixes it by making the jump impossible)

Well, I would say Capcom has good lawyers, but Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain because of a legal mistake Romero made. Don't get me wrong, I love zombie stuff. But if I am being honest...

I am (somewhat less than fondly, although I still have a great love for this game) reminded of The Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 on PS2, wherein my 9-10 year old mind found great joy in scaring away the birds, found throughout Nosgoth, that turn into green smoke. Fast forward to the Elemental Forge of Darkness, where I found it fun to run along the edge of the balcony outside, making sure to scare away every single bird in the process, before making my way into the Dungeon. After hours of my childish and illogical attempts to solve the logic puzzles that were this games dungeons, I finally completed the Forge and got my hands on the Dark Reaver, a necessary component of my progression. Overjoyed at my success I ran straight for the exit. However, upon arriving and attempting to open the door with my newly imbued weapon, I found it to be completely, and totally, locked. After hours of searching the Dungeon for another exit, and attempting the door several hundred more times, I begrudgingly decide that I needed to reload a previous save, my most recent (and only) save being right back in the Dungeon before solving it. (This is the point in my life where I learned NOT to overwrite my saves if I could help it.) So I once again solve the dungeon and try to leave, only to be stopped once again. Luckily, for me, GOOGLE existed, so I searched and searched the web for the cause of my frustration, and a solution, which was much more difficult then, than it is now. Turns out, scaring away the birds prevents the cutscene on the outside of the Dungeon from triggering, and there is nothing you can do about it once you're inside, which in turn means that I am now stuck here forever, short of starting a whole new game... This game is the sole reason that I restart games when I lose tons of progress, rather than just continue on from where I ended up, I'm absolutely sure of it.

Fallout 1 and 2 both have a time limit to complete the main quest. In Fallout 1 you have a 100 in game days to find and return with a water chip before the vault runs out of water and in Fallout 2 you have 13 in game years to find a GECK before your tribe starves. Not sure how anyone could run out of time in a normal play through of F2 but I would call it nonsensical

In quest for glory 1 by Sierra you could make the game impossible 2 ways... 1, if you're playing the thief you may be thinking you can steal stuff, and theres a few buildings you can rob. However, if you steal a few health potions from the Healer she notices it the next day and bar's you from entering and you can't make amends at all. So that means you cannot bring her the ingredients for the dispel potion you need to break the curse on the princess and she will kill you over and over. 2. The local butcher mentions there is a stag in the woods and if someone could bring it down it would help the town immensely. If you do it'll run away, and you'll think you need to boost your skills more first.. However, when you get sent to see the Dryad she'll turn you into a stag because you attacked a peaceful forest creature, because this doesn't happen as soon as you attack the stag you could spend a few more hours or even beat most of the game before needing to see her and realizing you f'd up.

Episode 1.... the funniest line from actin a foo' in that town was "What kind if a Jedi breaks into a man's house!?" LMADO!🤣🤣

When playing Fallout 3, I decided it was a good idea near the start of the game to try and pick the lock into a safe. It said the lock would be very hard, however I got it right away only to be met with a huge robot hell bent on my destruction. The game also thought it was a great idea to auto-save as soon as the door opened. With no other save point I could do nothing but die every time I loaded in. The worst part was restarting and not remembering my dialog choices and thus not being able to get something good I had done previously. Made me put the game down and never return.

Calling bs on that Monkey Island2 section as I played it in 1991 and the Special Edition. As i recall it, in 1991 there were two difficulty versions to play. In the easy one, you needed 20 pieces of Eight to charter as ship to leave Scabb Island. In the easy version simply polishing the peg leg of that pirate 20 times would do to get that money. In the "difficult" version with "All the puzzles" the pirate says after 19 times, that he is out of money. So it was impossible to polish it 6000x.

I always think if it is possible to essentially softlock myself in games by building my character incorrectly, or if the developers have thought about the possibility that I simply haven't picked a very specific power. And that was my reasoning to beating Deus Ex: Human Revolution with no upgrades on the hardest difficulty. I'm now planning a similar run, but this time I dump all my gear when I enter a new area. What if I ran out of ammo and healing items? What if I didn't find any gun upgrades? Am I just supposed to give up and load an old save/start over?

15:49 "Congratulations, you made it to the end of this video without rendering it unwatchable; leave that to us." 🤣🤣

It's been a while since I played Goldeneye, but I kind of remember there was a scientist in the facility that would eventually open the door on his way to the washroom if you blasted the computer. You weren't stuck permanently, but you were going to have to wait a while for him and his keycard.

Mike wtf man! Your bookshelf is giving me conniptions! I was going to write a nice comment about the cool simpsons arcade machine with the lovely matching stool, but that oh that bookshelf is really annoying... ooh 😤😤

Honorable mention for this list is that in Skyrim if you spend too much time leveling your non-combat skills - alchemy, speech, lockpicking, pickpocketing, sneak, speech, and smithing - the game world will level up to the point where you are constantly getting shellacked and it makes the game nearly unplayable.

The opener on this one was so funny. "The least cool form of sabotage" haha

Maniac Mansion: I was old enough to play it too young to understand urgency. (This is from memory which is around 30 years ago) If you activate a nuclear meltdown but don't find the code to disable the countdown... the whole mansion will blow up and everyone dies. You loose but this is right towards the end of the game so all of the hours you have put into it go wasted and you need to start again

I love you Mike.

Also a good way to make Daggerfall unwinnable: accidentally saving the game while poisoned, so that resting or fast-travelling would instantly kill you. Or just trying to walk for more than a few minutes.

In uncharted 4, there’s a section with a Jeep, if you put the Jeep in the contraption before doing anything else the game is locked since you cannot reverse the Jeep out of the contraption

Nice Timothy Dalton in Licence to Kill reference.

In Fable 3, if you fast travel everywhere you can you get through the story quite quickly and you will also be stupendously underpowered for the werewolves that appear later on. At this point all the side quests are suddenly rock hard (cause werewolves) und you're pretty much stuck

Mike's on top form in this one Boned, James Boned 😂

Skyrim. Getting so distracted by the runed lexicon in Discerning The Transmundane that you forget to pick the Elder Scroll up and leave. (Good job you have just broken the main story, and best of all probably every future playthrough, although Dawnguard still works)

It's possible in Subnautica to find yourself stranded too deeply in underwater caves or wrecks to get back to a vehicle or the surface. It's rare, since by that point in the game you should know better than to explore too far without spare batteries and such, but foolishness (or a particularly nasty run of bad luck) can absolutely destroy your vehicles and kill you. If you didn't bring a building tool and your last autosave was in an underwater outpost in certain areas, you might be trapped there forever.

It's a pity that developers try to protect us from this these days. Let the player mess up. Let them lose.

Does just being bad at games count as being Unwinnable with my nonsense?

There was a flash game called A Small Favor that involved doing tasks for various characters in exchange for furthering your goal of assassinating a politician. One part involved getting security clearance to another area, and there were multiple ways to do this. It also meant that there was a way to lock yourself out by killing both of the NPCs that could upgrade your security chip. The game would recognize this, then proceed to kill you for failing your mission.

you still can through the door in goldeneye. just be loud enough and shoot around with the AK(KF7) and some scientist from some rooms further down will run towards you and open the door. and if you destroy the other door opening computers, just stand in front of the glass in the left hallway and shoot the glass with the AK. the guard will open ;)