10 Video Games That Punished You For Buying Them
These games made you feel bad for splashing the cash.
Most video games are of course intended to entertain the player and get those dopamine receptors firing off in all directions, to ensure they remain glued to the screen for as long as possible.
But not all games have quite such lofty goals in mind - sometimes there's a clear, active desire on the part of the developers to make players suffer, and even punish them for the very act of opening their wallet and buying what they had to offer.
These 10 video games all effectively punished those who splashed cash on them, from blatant anti-games which mocked the very notion of exchanging currency for a real product, to games designed to be maddeningly difficult to the point that you ended up feeling a teensy bit fleeced.
If you threw down some dough for these games, all you got for it was a stern punishment, whether physical, mental, or spiritual.
And yet, you can't even call all of these games bad. At least a few of them are genuinely well-made enough that they can't merely be pawned off as cynical exercises in Trying To Go Viral...
10. Meme Run
Let's kick this list off with a game that's unabashedly a troll in video game form - 2014's Wii U-exclusive endless runner Meme Run.
As its title suggests, this runner is meme-themed, with the player navigating a series of meme-packed levels while controlling a stick figure with a trollface.
Pre-release sentiment criticised the game's evident low quality, prompting 20-year-old developer Jordan Schuet to respond that the game itself was a feat of trolling, before dubbing it "Game of the Year 2014."
Basically, Schuet made an intentionally poor game "for the lulz," which in tandem with universally poor reviews, really only left players to blame if they dared to shell out five bucks to play it.
They didn't have too long to do so, though, as Meme Run was removed from the Nintendo eShop less than three months after release, when the creator of the trollface meme, artist Carlos Ramirez, filed a copyright takedown claim. Oh, what a shame.