10 Cruel Tricks Video Games Played On Open World Players

1. Tempting You With A Shortcut - Death Stranding

Everyone will have a different example of an open world game that tempted them with a shortcut that they decided to take and then deeply regretted 15 to 25 minutes later when they found themselves jammed on the side of an almost entirely vertical mountain knowing they would have been at their location by now if they just followed the GPS.

But we’ve all done it. You set your next location on your map and then you realise your GPS is directing you in the total opposite direction so you tell yourself the fastest way between two points is in a straight line and set off as such.

Even if there’s a mountain in the way. Or a barricade, or a town, or a body of water.

Perhaps the most brutal punisher of this mentality is Death Stranding where I vividly remember spending hours of my life trying to take what I had thought to be a shortcut only to find myself out of ropes and ladders halfway up a waterfall. In a game with arduous traversal mechanics you’d be forgiven for trying to get somewhere more directly, but in Death Stranding a shorter route almost always means a practically impassable one. Which you’ll realise for yourself when all your cargo is destroyed and you’re stuck in a nasty spot of timefall.

This one is admittedly kind of on us, but you’ll have wasted so much time that we can go ahead and just say this is the cruellest trick an open world video game has played on us.