8 Weirdest Video Game Enemies (And What They Represent)
Not everything is as it seems with your favourite games.
For a medium that's just supposed to be about clobbering goblins and firing space lasers into alien faces, there sure are a lot of allegories bubbling away under the surface of most games.
From beautifully designed narratives that get you to question your very sense of being, to sprawling open worlds eerily reflective of our own, video game designers love loading up their work with a thick layer of symbolism. And of course, video game enemies are no different.
The creatures that populate our pixel worlds aren't just meat sacks made for the pummelling. Designers have poured over how to make monsters worthy of defeating, whether that's in twisted reflections of character's psyches, or by distilling primitive fears into something horrifyingly tangible, making for some of the most interesting and deep creations you can find in modern media.
Of course, this is all one long way of saying spooky monsters have more too them than just looking a bit weird, really, as we're about to reinforce in this list. But hey, you guys already knew that - it's your comments that have made the cut in this never-ending monster manual.
8. Mantiqueen - The Outer Worlds
Pop culture reigns free in The Outer Worlds, with Firefly and Serenity, Red Dwarf, and Futurama laying claim to parts of the world building and dialogue, but The Outer Worlds takes its enemies and makes them completely their own - like the oft found Mantisaur that has been blown up to epic proportions by failed terraforming.
Mantisaurs are your average space-age preying mantis gone rogue, taking their inspiration from the mantis name and turning it into some twisted version of a giant dinosaur. And whilst a big old insectoid monstrosity is enough for some good plasma battles, the message of the Mantisaurs seems to be representative of the fear of the future - the fear of building, the fear of technology gone wild, and the fear of a habitat coming back to claim what once was.
That the Mantiqueens are designed with some serious trypophobia - the fear of clustered holes - seems to want to reinforce this blind fear of nature even more intensely. Perhaps it's a comment on the invasion of home turf and possession of land, and these native creatures appear so terrifying because they're so different from humanity in a stark reminder of our own problematic pasts.