10 Times Video Games Used Reverse Psychology (And It Totally Worked)

The Stanley Parable is a game concerned entirely with subverting players' expectations of what a video game should be, particularly how the player makes decisions and is guided to an outcome through in-game mechanics such as button prompts.

The notion of player obedience is especially playfully dissected in the game's "apartment ending," in which Stanley's apartment begins to transform into his office as the player complies with each new button prompt.

It gets to the point where the narrator even urges the player not to keep listlessly following the prompts, seeming to suggest to players that there is a way to escape the apartment/office without following the prompt.

Players may as such spend considerable time trying to figure out what to do instead to trigger the next scene, but in actual fact the only way to reach the ending is to indeed comply and press the button prompts. Cheeky or what?