10 Most Out Of Place Scenes In Gaming History
Trust Hideo Kojima to make it onto this list. Twice.
Video games are so massive these days, spending years in development with hundreds of creative voices in the mix, such that it's little surprise so many games struggle to maintain a consistent tone throughout.
For far longer than a mere movie or TV series, a video game needs to keep players fully immersed in its story, characters, and gameplay - for potentially dozens, even hundreds of hours - without letting the mask slip.
But as we've seen so many times over the years, even the best games can't always avoid serving up scenes and moments that feel incredibly out of place.
Though it's fair to say that developers will sometimes do this quite deliberately in order to subvert expectations and shock players, more often it's a result of storytelling and gameplay that don't quite gel together.
From astoundingly silly moments that players weren't at all expecting, to unintentionally comical death scenes, wildly unexpected campy interludes, and perhaps the most unearned sex scene in gaming history, these scenes were all so jarringly left-field that players were left either cringing or laughing - or both.
For better or worse, these scenes stuck out like the very sorest of thumbs...
10. Chris Redfield Vs. A Boulder - Resident Evil 5
As much as the Resident Evil franchise started out with two feet planted firmly in the realm of survival horror, it's never really taken itself all that seriously, what with the campy, B-movie-inspired tone of the earlier games before the shift into Michael Bay-on-steroids action schlock.
Resident Evil 5 might well feature the single most infamous moment of the entire series, though, an action beat of such preposterous, thigh-slapping absurdity that even the franchise's most permissive, action-hungry fans deemed it a bit much.
We're talking of course about the scene where, during the final battle with Wesker in a volcano, Chris finds himself blocked by a gigantic boulder. A QTE sequence follows, resulting in Chris hilariously punching the boulder until it finally agrees to move out of his way.
Even with Chris getting a yoked redesign for the game, it was still absolutely implausible that he'd be able to shift such a large object with his mere fists, leading to widespread ridicule that the series had well and truly, finally, jumped the shark.
Despite this, the incident was unexpectedly referenced in the recent eighth main game, Resident Evil Village, where villain Heisenberg referred to Chris as a "boulder-punching a**hole."
No other moment in the series is more emblematic of its frustrating departure from horror to action which, thankfully, has been rectified in recent installments.
Even for how generally action-heavy Resident Evil 5 is, this is a sheer cartoon.