11 Off-Map Video Game Secrets You Won't Believe

Ah, noclip. Once a well-known boundary-break tool developers made readily available, now a lost art reserved only for hardcore techies and dedicated data miners.

Makes sense, I suppose, given the ever-increasing scale and budget of the game industry's most popular produce. After all, how are you supposed to be immersed in that beautifully rendered open world if you're zooming around through walls and mountains like they're made of smoke?

Despite this, some developers have remembered that gamers can't resist going where they're not supposed to go in video games, and decided to add in some of the most hilarious, creepy and utterly dumbfounding secret content you've ever seen, hidden outside the map just for them to find.

Suitably, most of these off-map tidbits require the faithful noclip cheat, giving you freedom to fly outside of the game's framework totally unobstructed. In other cases, the player can get out of bounds simply by exploiting certain game environments to hurl themselves somewhere they shouldn't be.

Both paths have one thing in common, however:

The things you find at the end are guaranteed to leave you speechless.

There's a reason everybody you meet in 2015's Dying Light warns you not to go out after dark. As soon as the eponymous light dies away, the regular zombies of Harran will be the least of your worries, for this is the time that the Volatiles come out to play.

These beings are incredibly fast, incredibly hard to kill, and, if you can't get away in time, incredibly lethal. Larger enemies exist within the game, but for the entirety of Dying Light, it's these nocturnal nightmares that pose the biggest threat of them all.

The game's expansion, The Following, introduced the concept of Volatile nests, which are where the creatures retreat to during the day.

However, one such nest does exist in the main game, too, if you look hard enough.

In a side corridor of an abandoned tunnel is a locked room, and trying the door will cause a Volatile to leap up at you and try to claw its way out. By noclipping your way in, you'll suddenly come face to face with the biggest horde of Volatiles you'll ever have seen at that point.

They don't attack you, but if you've played the game and seen first-hand the danger that even one of these can do, the scene is absolutely an unsettling one. Time to grapple the heck out of there and go foraging in more skips, methinks.