Top 10 Video Games That Mess With You In Real Life

Another game that enjoys throwing fake audio and visual glitches at you, “Doki Doki Literature Club!” became notorious for its cutesy art style and dating sim gameplay masking something far, far darker. “Doki Doki” is actually a deep and thoughtful examination of mental health, despite its frequent use of shocking imagery, and also the visual novel genre as a whole. In the end, “Doki Doki” becomes a game that doesn’t want you to play it, which even locks itself in certain endings. It forces you to access the game’s files and delete them while toying with the idea of video game characters gaining sentience. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart.

Independent developer Lucas Pope’s brainchild, “Papers, Please” puts you in the shoes of a low-ranking border official working for an authoritarian regime. On the one hand, you have a family at home you need to feed, and your pay hinges on how many people you correctly allow or deny passage over the border. On the other hand, you have those very people, many of them desperate and looking to make a better life. There are no right or easy answers in “Papers, Please”, and you’ll eventually find yourself committing atrocities on behalf of a faceless government. That’s how it messes with your mind.

If you go into “Undertale” knowing absolutely nothing about it, as many people did, and having played many classic turn-based RPGs, you may have drifted through the game killing the enemies in your path to collect that all-important “EXP”. But notoriously, “Undertale” flips the entire concept of XP on its head; As Sans later explains, those aren’t experience points, they’re execution points, and you didn’t have to kill any of the characters you encountered. You were just conditioned by other RPGs to think that’s what you should be doing, and you made your life much harder while also playing right into Flowey’s hands.

#6: “The Stanley Parable” (2011)

Also in:

Top 10 Video Games That Break the 4th Wall

Like “Undertale”, “The Stanley Parable” is also subversive and makes you question video game mechanics that you’d usually ignore. This time, it’s whether or not you obey what the omniscient narrator is telling you to do. Normally in games, you’ll follow the objectives on-screen without stopping to think about them, but from the get-go “The Stanley Parable” makes you wonder what will happen if you do the opposite of what the narrator says. But it goes a step further, by making you wonder whether the narrator actually wants you to disobey; maybe by trying to rebel, you’re doing exactly what he wants? It’s certainly a head-scratcher.

This isn’t a game where you don’t know right from wrong; you, the player, do know right from wrong, and are aware that the actions you’re perpetrating are very quickly becoming indefensible war crimes – but you have no way to stop it from happening. You’re playing as Walker, part of an elite squad sent into sandstorm-stricken Dubai to take down a rogue colonel. Though it masquerades as a standard wartime shooter, it’s really a commentary on the whole genre and the way games can sometimes glorify the horrors they depict. “Spec Ops: The Line” doesn’t shy away from its repugnant lead character, and will leave you suspicious of every shooter you touch.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be living inside a modernist painting? That’s the question “Antichamber” was designed to answer, sending you through a series of abstract rooms to solve even more abstract puzzles while cryptic messages appear on the walls and the laws of physics break down. Sometimes, you might even solve a puzzle without entirely knowing how or what you did. It’s a game that completely bends the rules and constantly defies your expectations, and you’ll never know what the next room holds. You might not know what any of the rooms have held even when the game ends.

#3: “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty” (2001)

Also in:

The 10 WEIRDEST Moments in Metal Gear Solid Games

We’ve heard time and time again how shocking it was when Psycho Mantis read your memory card and made your controller rumble in “Metal Gear Solid”, but “Metal Gear Solid 2” has just as many fourth-wall-breaking tricks up its sleeve. During the dramatic climax, you’ll get a frantic call from the Colonel telling you to turn off your games console – and also not to sit too close to the TV. Not only was the Colonel a virtual construct, but the entire game was a virtual construct in the narrative – a massive simulation to see if Raiden is fit to be Solid Snake’s successor.

#2: “BioShock” (2007)

Also in:

10 Predictions For BioShock 4

Much like “The Stanley Parable”, “BioShock” also questions your willingness as a player to go along with everything a largely unseen but ever-present narrator asks you to do. You spend most of “BioShock” under the assumption you’re simply another silent video game hero performing unquestionably heroic actions, freeing the decaying city of Rapture from the grip of its creator and controller Andrew Ryan. This turns out not to be the case at all; you are silent, but only because you’re being manipulated by Atlas and that infamous code phrase. You were just a puppet forced to do exactly what Atlas wanted and you never had a way to do anything else.

This Lovecraftian horror game is beloved by many, and was the progenitor of the “sanity meter”, a mechanic used in countless games since its inception. As the game progresses, you’re sent on a whirlwind tour of various time periods, but all the characters - bar one - have a sanity meter that will cause them to hallucinate. These hallucinations are more than just unsettling, they can also damage you and make the game harder. It’ll also start breaking the fourth wall eventually, tricking you into thinking your TV has turned off, thinking your console is broken, or even that all your save files have just been deleted. You’ll struggle to ever trust a video game again.