10 Video Games That Secretly REWARD You For Cheating

Rules were made to be broken... or ignored entirely.

Dark souls
FromSoftware

For as long a there have been video games, there have been cheats.

Cheat codes (a tool intended for developer use to gain weapons, ammo or invincibility for testing purposes), may be a distant pang of nostalgia for many of us, but that's only made players more creative in finding ways to break games for their benefit.

Whether you call them cheats, exploits, glitches - or even if they're built into the game - there are many techniques to circumvent playing a game the way its developers intended.

For some, it would be counterproductive to deliberately shorten a game, either by skipping sequences or trivializing its challenges. But no game is perfect for everyone, and these tricks and shortcuts can save a lot of headaches for repeat players slogging through their least favorite part of a game. And for many, the act of finding these quirks is the funnest part.

Whatever your reason, these are select cheats, exploits, glitches, tips, tricks and shortcuts that make your games drastically easier.

10. The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild - Think Outside The Box

Dark souls
Nintendo

For some, Zelda's 'puzzle room' Shrines were a nice way to break up the usual act of exploration. For others, a sorry replacement for traditional dungeons that served as more of an annoyance. Fortunately, the easiest way to complete many of the shrines was not to do them at all.

Thanks to the game's robust mechanics and physics, players found so many possible exploits that finding ways to skip shrines became almost a game unto itself.

Walls can be bypassed with "shield jumps" - a technique where a player leaps into the air, shield surfs, then plants and detonates a bomb in midair to send them careening over barriers.

Alternatively, you can freeze an object in place with the stasis power, hit it to build up its momentum, then grab on and wait for it to launch you across the room. Does a motion-controlled Marble-Madness-like puzzle got you down? All it takes is a careful flick of the wrist to toss that ball right over the maze you were meant to navigate.

For players who can think abstractly, finding ways to skip the shrines comes more naturally than the puzzles themselves, meaning you net those oh-so rewarding treasure chests even faster.

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At 34 years of age, I am both older and wiser than Splinter.