8 Weirdest Enemies Cut From Video Games

Nightmare frogs, fire lizards and sex monsters? NOPE.

Half Life Mr Friendly
Valve

Gaming is one of the only mediums in which the creators have a truly unlimited amount of possibility at their fingertips.

Want to build a giant sentient snowball eating a McNuggets sharer box while firing a machine gun at a target made of purple marshmallows?

As long as you can create a fun game around it, go right ahead. How about a castle made of laser beams that says "feed me grapes" in Spanish if the player drops six healing potions and nine arrows down a secret chute at the back of the area? Fill your boots, you strange human being.

The point is, game developers can go as weird as they like - and often, they do just that. Sometimes, they even go too weird, and the resulting creations are not included in the final build of the game.

A collection of curious enemy types have suffered this exact fate over the years, only to be re-discovered further down the line. In another reality, these games would've featured encounters with some remarkably abnormal foes, and while they failed to make the cut, we can at least gaze upon their weirdness courtesy of the many traces they left behind during development.

8. Elh (Luigi's Mansion)

Elh Luigi's Mansion
Nintendo

Luigi's Mansion is all about dealing with the various ghosts, ghouls and spectres that are haunting the titular building, with Mario's younger, greener brother traversing the mansion's rooms and sucking up enemies with a magic vacuum cleaner.

The game also contains a handful of bosses for Luigi to do battle with, such as the pun-tastic Vincent Van Gore and the powerful King Boo, and at one point, they might have been joined by an additional big-bad whose spirit now resides deep within the game's files: Elh.

This curious enemy (named due to the word "elh" being found in its file name) can be brought into the game by using the Action Replay cheat cartridge, and resembles a melting marshmallow that's been twisted into a nightmarish, demonic shape. Due to being incomplete and abandoned, Elh has a limited number of animations, and all it can really do in its current state is just flail around wildly.

It's never been confirmed that Elh was intended to be a boss, but its size - and the fact that the rest of the game contains nothing quite like it - makes this a solid possibility.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!