7 Weird Ways Games Punished You for Going Slow: Commenter Edition 

"Who would reap HIM?" The flu. The flu reaps the Reaper.

You actually can technically kill the ghost in Spelunky - it has 9999 HP and only takes damage from passing through a lava pool. You may have already done a vid like this, but if not, a good candidate for "7 supposedly 'unkillable' enemies that were surprisingly mortal, in the end"

There _is_ a way to outsmart the reaper in P5. During flu season, if you encounter the Reaper with a certain status debuff, Despair, then it will die to that debuff in 3 turns, rewarding your party with a frankly inhumane amount of EXP.

Something to note about the ghost: It turns any gemstones it passes through into diamonds, which are more valuable, so the ghost can actually be helpful for farming money! Risk = Reward!

The infection mechanic in RE outbreak actually sounds super neat! Most zombie games treat infection as an instakill or just ignore it altogether

Interesting note about the Necrodancer trapdoors, if you're playing as Aria, Coda, or Dove, it just murders you. Aria and Coda, because trapdoors count as missed beats, and Dove dies for "Cowardice." Aria's default soundtrack takes advantage of this, and doesnt have the last beat of the song, so you'll be left with just Aria's scream at the end if you take to slow

The proof of how the Sonic drowning theme has traumatized me is that I knew it would play at some point during the music entry, but I still got goosebumps and stress when I heard it.

The first mission of Deus Ex: Human Revolution had an actual (invisible) timer that counted down if you dawdled on going to the hostage situation. Take too long and all the hostages are dead when you arrive.

The music slowing in Spelunky isn't a 30 second warning; it slows when the ghost spawns. You can spend as long as you like on a level as long as you can continue to outmaneuver the ghost. This is a strategy used for high score runs as gems are converted to more valuable diamonds when the ghost passes over them.

The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Pikachu being named PikaJane makes me imagine its a Detective Pikachu situation where Pikachu has the voice and personality of Jane who is just endlessly sick of all of the Pokemon Mystery BS going on

I've never seen very much gameplay of Spelunky, but the idea of the music going SLOWER and getting distorted when you're running out of time and the execution of it literally sent a chill down my spine.

I get individual levels/dungeons having timers, but I REALLY hate when the whole game is on a timer.

There's an old arcade game called "Prisoner of War". Fairly standard side-scrolling beat-em-up with an interesting gimmick. The gimmick is that if you don't move on when the game tells you to move on, after a while four riflemen appear from the left of the screen and simultaneously fire their weapons to the right, killing you instantly. The interesting bit is that these guys actually count as regular enemies. Meaning that you can kick them and obtain the most powerful weapon in the game in the first room, assuming your timing is good enough.

As someone that likes to explore and/or try to get out of bounds in everything I play I would get hit by all of these, worse is when games have hidden timers that decide what ending you get. I never did get the good ending for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon on the GBA because the last level has a surprisingly strict timer.

If you’re on the OG Persona 5 you could “win” a reaper fight during flu season as he’d give up after 3 rounds if he had the “despair” status. Sadly not in P5Royal

I feel like the PMD ejection is actually the dungeon changing its layout, and it's expelling anyone that isn't a part of the dungeon itself.

I again submit the following. "Times you were told exactly who the BBEG was and didn't realize" And "Common everyday objects you opened in games and immediately regreted"

Majora's Mask should totally be on this list. There's a literal moon waiting to squish you (and the rest of the world) if you take too long. :P

Fun fact. Back in the original release of Persona 5. Weather affects the enemies in mementos. Go in the dungeon during flu season and shadows have a chance of being inflicted with the despair status effect which kills them in a few turns. A popular cheese to kill the reaper back in the day was go in during flu season and you guessed it, literal death has a chance to be infected woth despair. Even literal death isn't immune to the debilitating effects of flu season. They patched this out on the Royal version of Persona 5 though which is a shame.

Little thing about the reaper, it was there since persona 3 in which it played a similar role in the game’s main dungeon Tartarus, while in persona 4 it appeared after 21 chests were opened and hid in a random chest on the floor. In those games reaper was hard to beat because it couldn’t be inflicted with despair.

If we're including ultimate time limits for the game, Fallout 1 has a good penalty system. You only have so many days to finish the game, but it also penalizes you if you take long. Communities get overrun by supermutants one after the other until you win. Take long enough, and every town is dead.

On the opposite end of the road, games that punished you for going too fast. Borderlands 3 had so much dialogue that quitting to the menu and reloading was usually faster than listening to all the dialogue. However... there are at least 1or 2 dialogue skips that will softlock your game. Pretty sure it has since been patched. Another example would be the oddworld games. Speedrun the game without saving any mudokins and you get the bad ending.

In Doom and it's sequel Doom Eternal the game punishes players for going slow by making enemies more accurate when attacking.

I love the “Andy talks over the game scroll” bit

This reminded me of "Haven" - a game about a pair of lovers, hiding on a distant planet. If you take too long outside your ship, you start to hear turmoils, and then a monstrous roar (I was scared shi*less first time I heard it). If you take even more time, you will finally witness a giant whale chasing your characters. However, while the Beruberu (the whale's name) *is* the strongest enemy in the game, the game itself is *very easy.* It even literaly says this to you, when you pick the difficulty level: "Haven is *not* a difficult game". So Beruberu ends up being a scarier tale, than he is in person. Scared shi*less, still...

If you do another commenter edition of this topic, may I suggest Fallout (the original game)? Not only does it have a visible timer of 150 days in order to get the water chip, but it also has a hidden 500 day timer before your vault is invaded. I see indications that the second may have been removed in later patches if you don't pay for a caravan to supply your vault with water (a way to extend the first timer), though .

The fear of Van Blubba always used to stress me and my younger brother out when we used to play Bubble Bobble on the NES

Oh, I remember my first encounter with the mysterious unseen wind force in PMD as a kid! At first I got creeper out by it and did indeed hurried on, but later curiosity got the better of me and I tried to lure it out, thinking maybe it's a legendary pokemon and got blown away. Kind of a bummer

I remember Castlevania 64 had an extra boss fight and a bad ending for taking too long. I played through it normally a few times before deciding in one playthrough to really explore and look for secrets. I don't think I found anything big, like a secret ultimate weapon or whatever, but because I took so long, and because I spent too much money on the demon shop, I ended up with two secret boss fights, and the bad ending.

Pikachu judging us in the thumbnail there. Mr Shook

I felt that Mass Effect 2 was a little extreme in this regard with the way it decided to hold part of your crew hostage with the threat of killing them if you wanted to continue with side missions instead of finishing the main story

I was used to not being able to run in Undertale, so It really surprised me that, not only could you run in Deltarune, but in the very beginning, when walking with Susie, she was constantly commenting on me being slow, even getting more aggressive over time if I remember correctly. That's the only time in a game that I went "Ok, jeez, I'll use the shift button!" out loud.

The Reaper exists more of a way to not let you overlevel faster than you should than a punishment for taking too long. Same for Mystery Dungeon

Not sure if this counts but in Starbound, you need fuel to do jumps in the galaxy. To get fuel you can buy it at a very over priced rate or you can go find some yourself. To find such fuel you need to visit any moon and start digging for fuel ore or bountiful pools of liquid fuel. But be careful while digging down into the dark depths because an Erchius ghost is slowly creeping up on you. It is invincible and if it reaches you, it will rapidly drain your energy so you can't dash away and your health so you are pretty much dead. You can constantly run away from the ghost and collect more and more fuel. But the more fuel you gather, the faster the ghost becomes. Another thing to keep in mind is that you cannot beam up to your ship while underground so hopefully you have a good escape plan to get out of your cave and not get lost in whatever cavern you fell into. If you are thinking about digging your way out, you might as well run into the ghost, because digging out of the depths would take far too long before the ghost will get you. Once you find your way out of the caverns, you can safely teleport back to your ship and get on with your adventure.

Spyhunter 2 didn't just have a timer for the missions, but it also had a huge weaponised truck enemy which you could always see in the rear view mirror. If you stopped and hung around for a moment, it would catch up with you and it did so much damage that it was practically a death sentence

I had no idea that there was this wind mechanic in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. I’ve actually learned something today from one of my favourite games

The Jackals from Let it Die come to mind. When you kill the last enemy on the floor it starts a countdown. If it hits 0 elite enemies start spawning massive health pools and doing massive amounts of damage. They are killable though, but you have to come prepared or you're gonna have a bad time

The one i always hated was the Golgolithic Mass from Sword and Sworcery. It appeared on certain screens accompanied by the sound of screams, and its own theme song appropriately titled 'Death to Everyone'. It would chase you across the screen and moved faster than you did, so it almost always caught you and you would have to defeat it in a battle cut-scene. Didn't matter how many times i fought the asshole, it always made my blood run cold when it appeared.

For the Reaper in P5 you're not going slow, you're excessively grinding in one area. Same with PMD you're not going slow, you're excessively grinding in one area. The design of this isn't to punish you for going slow rather to stop you from being stupid. In the case of both games you will unlock higher level areas and progress the plot with days passed. Grinding excessively in one area means you will miss out on items later as you'll be more likely to rush through things.

I guess Kiwi Kraze doesn't have _that_ weird a way of punishing you that slowly but when I saw the short clip I immediately remembered that music and gosh I do wish my childhood favorite made this list~!

As a kid, I was so excited when I got Pikmin 2 and one of the featured changes was not having to be on a strict 30 day time limit like the original. "Finally," I thought, "what a great chance to just relax, enjoy and explore the world at my own pace, and bond with my Pikmin!" Little did my young self know that I was going to be bombarded on the daily with guilt tripping messages from my boss asking to know when I'll be done with my quest, begging me to hurry up, and telling me horror stories about how he has to hide from loan sharks by living under a bridge. Honestly, I think I'd prefer Emperor Bulbax at that point...

In games like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and Persona with randomly generated levels, it makes sense to have a sort of timer to push you along. That’s because some of the floors will randomly be bonus floors with some kind of boon, and the game players don’t want you just sitting back and reaping the rewards. It might break the game balance.

The original Fallout games punished the player for going too slow as if you go exploring the wasteland you’ll endanger Vault 13 and result in the vault running out of water if you haven’t found the chip or invaded by super mutants if you have already found the water chip. When running out of time cutscenes of the vault's water are showed as the third one showing when the vault runs out of water which is a game over and is creepy for a Fallout game which came out in 1997.

Not sure if Xcom 2 qualifies or has already been covered, but I absolutely hated having a turn counter that ticks down while I try to desperately guide my team through hordes of aliens without anyone dying

Bonus entry: in Ride to Hell: Retribution you are punished for dawdling by being *checks notes forced to play this abomination longer... truly an orwellian punishment

As a bonus, Breath of Fire 5: Dragon Quarter also has a time-limit based mechanic despite being a turn-based RPG. Just moving around increases your D-Counter very slightly, you can use some special moves in exchange for increasing this counter further, but if that counter hits 100%, it's game over (unless *spoiler* happens), forcing a restart to NG+ where you get sent back to the start of the game, but with everything you had before. Of course, the thing is, the game-over state is you turning into a dragon. Which is while awesome, also leaves you not human unfortunately. (also apparently pretty bloody and painful)

Moonlighter has something similar to the Persona one, a monster called The Wanderer, which appears if you stay on a floor for too long.

Going through some rough stuff. I know you guys hear this all the time, but thank you for doing what you do. Your career path has done a lot more for people's mental health and well being than I can possibly convey. I wish you lot the best and I look forward to your continued success.

0:35 I half expected the Sonic CD's I'm Out of Here game over there

Operation Winback has a really stressful time limit, which if you do not meet, you will get a bad ending.

You should make a video on games that are impossible to beat. Like that penn and teller one, and Bubble Bobble Revolution, where a boss literally just does not spawn.

RE:O and File #2 were both awesome. The whole concept was actually a nice idea in the RE Universe.

I think the L4D games deserve a mention here, once you leave the saferooms, the games pretty well made director AI system starts up, spawning zombies, idling zombies, hordes of zombies, special zombies, and on some occasions, a super brutal and dangerous zombie called a tank. This zombie by the way can easily destroy the saferoom door, providing a deathly experience to any players who happen to be camping out in these now very unsafe rooms. Even if you just progress rather slowly you still put yourself at more risk than is necessary. Its not much to worry about if you play the game normally but the game does not take kindly to people who dawdle.

In the Harvest Moon games, there's a mechanic that, if you're out too late, will force you to stop what your doing and go home to start the new day. This can cause you to lose all the work you were doing at the moment. Amd, if you failed to treat your crops and animals in that time period, the crops can wilt and die and the animals can get sick and die. You are also sickened and tired, which reduces what you can do the next day. Some love interests will even lost affections points if you get sick.

In Star Control 2, the 2 main villain species are distracted by the war with each other. If you wait too long, _the worse side wins_ and slowly goes round the galaxy to annigi ... annihig ... kill literally everyone else. And, of course, in Outer Wilds ... [SPOILERS!] ... the sun goes supernova, usually taking you with it. The music preceding it is very effective in telling you to get a move on. Or to find a nice spot to see it happen. It's a rare treat to find a playthrough where they first experience it from the sunny side the closest, planet Ember Twin:)

Coolest thing about outbreak was once you turned you could than control yourself as a zombie to bite your co-op buddies 😀 Outbreak really should have been a bigger game in the UK. It was actually decent!

One that comes to mind, in the Sega Genesis game Comix Zone, in the final fight, the girl that was helping you throughout the game has been kidnapped, and is inside a tank filling with liquid. You hear her say things like "I'm drowning!" during the final boss fight. If you take too long, you get the bad ending, even if you beat the boss.

The infection level in outbreak could have been an amazing mechanic, if only they had programmed it so that it only starts counting after you got attacked for the first time! But the way it is, it's just a stress-inducing timer, that takes away a lot of the fun we could have had while playing those games, if there was no infection level in the first place.

If were going for classics, Parasol Stars has an enemy that can be best described as a flying pizza demon who kills you if you take too long.

The first "unkillable ghost who comes to hurry you up" that I remember was in the arcade game Rygar

Hey! RE: Outbreak was good! Just ahead of its time. If they RE-released Veronica or another game with co-op and limited voice communication, it'd be a solid release. It's one of those games that you had to play at the time online. I have such good memories of RE: Outbreak where I was freaking out on low health, not knowing if I was the last survivor or not. And if you died online? You became a zombie. You had a limited time, but you could try to convince people walking into a room that you were still alive, before lunging at them and biting them. Stuff like that doesn't exist today. So...If you play it today? Yeah, it's not the best. But back in its hayday? That was true survival horror.

Darkest Dungeon will call for reinforcements if you take too long during an enemy encounter. This was done to dissuade players from taking advantage of that last weakened enemy and using the following combat rounds to heal party health and de-stress your characters. Just search for Baertaffy’s worst Darkest Dungeon run for a prime example of this.

I thought I was the only one that remembered Bubble Bobble. I was obsessed with it as a kid. Pardon me while I go yell at a cloud. lol

14:18 Ryo should have said "I'm going to fork you up!" I will see myself out, but to be fair, it's a slow day when I resort to fork lift puns.

My favorite example of this is in Kings Quest VI. If you loiter next to Charon for too long, he gets annoyed and force-lightnings you to death. (It's my favorite because the streamer I watched play it left her computer without pausing the game and came back to a fried Alexander and chat telling her how hilarious it was.)

I’m surprised no mention of Mass Effect 2, after you get the IFF if you don’t hurry to the suicide mission you will have to watch your crew get liquified

That's part of what I hated about FF8. You could only attain a certain Seed rank, but if you took too long it knocked you down a rank, which was impossible to build back up. So you'd permanently lose rank if you took too long. F that game.

Similar to the virus gauge in Outbreak, Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter had the D-Counter. After a certain point in the plot it would appear onscreen; certain abilities would make it jump up, but even simply walking around would cause it to slowly creep up to 100%, and when that happened you got a special game over. Keep in mind this is a JRPG, so the name of the game becomes figuring out the most efficient path and stockpiling "Party XP" over multiple playthroughs

Outbreak was ahead of its time. We need a remake! I remember dying right before the end of a level...heartbreaking

To not get punished one should watch this video at 1,5 speed.

Very funny with the fast paced editing to keep the theme of the vid, nice job!

Who will show up to reap him? Me-i will. A high definition rendition of myself will appear to physically drag them away to the stygian abyss. Then back to actively playing the game. That is really taking my time.

Flashing gems Any bejeweled-like games Something about the games pointing the possible matching gems out everytime you don't make any moves for 5 second just feels insulting "No Im not stupid, i just need time"

The Infection in Outbreak reminds me of the D-Counter in Breath of Fire 5. Essentially, after a certain plot point early in the game, the main character Ryu awakens the powers of a dragon, but everytime you use them, this omni-present D-Counter fills up. If it reaches 100% before the final fight of the Game, you get a unique and actually quite gruesome Game Over. Even if you don't make use of the various Dragon Powers, the Counter still slowly fills up (like 0.01% for every 10 or 15 steps taken), making you choose carefully when, where and how you use them. This was made because Dragon Form in BoF 5 is STUPIDLY powerful, and would make the game an absolute cakewalk if you could use it with reckless abandon.

Moonlighter is also a pretty neat one if you take too long in a dungeon

As a kid, after I found that the wind thing was a thing, I thought it was a legendary pokemon that would spawn and I had to do something specific or be in a specific area to get it to properly spawn.

The persona reaper thing is kind of a gift if it's flu weather bc he just dies. Outsidexbox has covered this in a video btw

Actually, the ghost in Spelunky is killable. If you continuously have it move in and out of the surface of a lava pool, it will eventually die. takes a awhile, especially in single player, but it is doable.

You should have mentioned how in Persona 3 FES if you kill the reaper for the first time you get an item that can unlock the (optional) endgame dungeon with the hardest non boss enemies in the game.

Ah I remember like 30 years ago... being punished for being too slow in Shamus, by that 2 legged thing showing up... I suppose I was calling it ghost as it was going through walls.

Theres actually a trick you can use to kill the Reaper and even farm him for EXP in Persona 5. He's immune to instant death spells, but not the Despair status effect. So by attacking and running away from him during Flu Season, when every enemies in Mementos has a chance of being afflicted with it at the start of the fight, he'll eventually be affected by it and take himself out without the player needing to to anything.

I can’t believe that Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor wasn’t on this list. If you spend too long in particular levels, enemies you’ve previously killed will come back to life to try to kick your butt again.

Was only half paying attention to the video, then the sonic drowning music came on, I literally freaked out for a second.

I don't remember having been actually kicked from the mystery dungeons... But I have stirred the wind on multiple occasions. 😆 More often than not, if a game has a timer and starts to dictate how long I take to a ridiculous degree, I'll likely not be playing. Simple as that. I like taking my time exploring every nook and cranny.

Wouldn't zanki zero qualify Because not only will you go hungry you will eventually die from old age and put back into the starting hub if you take too long

I am really surprised, then, that I didn't get murdered in Shenmue, as I absolutely loved playing those arcade games and getting little figures. I guess I paced my gameplay a lot better than I thought I did.

The wind kicking you out of a dungeon is a returning feature in Mystery Dungeon games, it was in Torneko: Last Hope too, a PS game from 1999.

as for the resident evil thing that's actually explained! 10% of the population is immune to the waterborne virus. That's why the playable usually isn't infected, and why there's so many.

The Pokemon one reminded me of the reaper monster in Chocobo's dungeon 2 and Chocobo's dungeon Everybuddy. If you take too long, you get a similar warning but instead of wind, you start to see the horrible creature start to stalk you slowly... and you can't flee it.

Wouldn’t the entire DeadRising series be on this list? There are MULTIPLE punishments for taking your time, such as many missions failing, someone turning into a zombie because they didn’t get their zombrex on time, or missing the crucial main missions that cause either missing the helicopter rendezvous, or the military bombing the infected zone with you and others still in it.

The familiar music being sped up in the outro was brilliant!

In Zone Raiders, once the timer runs out, the game spawns a seemingly indestructible enemy hovercraft that chases you down and kills you in a couple of shots. The skinny is that the hovercraft in question is actually flying rather than simply hovering, making it difficult to evade it.

What about Binding of Issac. In a game with hundreds of items and challenges ans secrets that you may still be googling hundreds of hours in, it punishes you by locking you out of some challenges, bosses, and endings if you don't move through the levels pretty hastily

I'mma go with any Soulsborn game, where the only time I ever get invaded is when I step away for a second for a quick bio break or to refill my water cup.

Somehow, the music part reminds me of another thing --- the academy awards. If a winner takes too long with his/her speech on stage, the music starts playing to signify that they've got other better things to do, so hurry the F up, lol.

Rushing me is one way of putting me off playing... I'm an explorer, so take your timer and put it back in the kitchen.

I like to think of the wind in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon as the Gust of Wind card that I never knew what to do with but had 30 of haha

Hint for P5 - If you have had three conversations in the van, that's your pre-Mona freaking out cue to leave. :P

The main thing this video reminded me is how similar PMD's little music in the scene at 3:03 sounds very similar to the song "Our House" that I know from old time coffee commercials. lol

I love crypt of the necrodancer. It makes sense it pushes you forward. The game isn’t meant to be a slow paced rogue like.