7 Cutesy Games That Are Secretly Nightmare Dystopias

you think you know where you stand with cute things you stand within range of though don't cheat but in the unpredictable world of video games nothing is so certain and the games that may appear at first to be cheerful and perfectly friendly Harbor dark and creepy secret backstories stories that describe dead planets whole civilizations wiped out by plague or grim futures where all sense of humanity is lost and there are no squishable cheeks in sight here are the cutesy games that are secretly nightmare dystopias along the way beware spoilers for the following [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] for a long time the greatest worry we had about the tiny ant like Pikmin was the worry we all have about them falling into our mouths while we sleep and brighting our tonsils what sorry is that not a thing that you worry about yeah welcome to my hell Pikmin is a series in which space men such as captain olimar lead a team of plant animal hybrid Pikmin through a series of puzzles and tasks in the first game for instance the goal was to collect enough spaceship parts to get Olimar off the mysterious planet upon which he crash-lands cute enough but as the series has progressed one aspect of its world has proved particularly troubling the world itself to begin with the planet the Pikmin inhabit is described as a quote uncharted planet but to the eagle-eyed there are clues that suggests the world of Pikmin is none other than our own blue planet Earth only devoid of all traces of human life though never actually named as such the Pikmin planet certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to earth especially in this ending cutscene - Pikmin 2 in which you can clearly see what is undoubtedly Australia there are other subtle hints - like how the planet in the third game seems to resemble Pangaea Ultima which is a theoretical model of what the earth will look like within 250 million years or there's the thing where you sometimes come across 7up bottle caps probably should have just led without really I mean unless 7up is a universal constant found across the galaxy like gravity or the speed of light in a vacuum but a more pressing question is if this is earth what happened to all the people did we kill each other in a nuclear war that created irradiated plant mutations like the bulb orb or what if the Pikmin themselves are a parasitic species that swarm like locusts from planet to planet and when they first arrived on our world they eradicated all traces of human life the whole Pikmin falling in your mouth thing while you're asleep doesn't seem so crazy now does it please stop what I didn't even mention the nightmare about the Pikmin swarming up out of the plughole while you taking a bath like scrambling and eating an egg for your breakfast slime rancher is a perfectly enjoyable experience as long as you don't think too hard about what's actually happening after all the game is more whimsical than an Etsy store for my little pony throw pillows you play the charmingly named Beatrix LeBeau who takes charge of a slime ranch to fix it up grow food and farm the resident slimes for these shiny plots that they poop out all this is set to endearing music with a vibrant art style and best of all cute smiley faces on all the slimes Bart do a little digging into the slime rancher mythos and prepare to have your day ruined for instance did he know that the reason that Beatrix makes so much money farming slimes on the other side of the galaxy is because the plot byproducts is highly prized by futuristic mega corporations who turn it into everything from human food to Coffee sweetener to floor cleaner tabby floors for instance get turned into quote performance enhancing products that boost the eaters energy boom plots on the other hand are prized by the military for their destructive capabilities that's right the poop you're farming is being shipped straight to the front lines of some appalling space war probably the slimes don't mind they're happy you might think but bear in mind that a because they're an alien species the resemblance with human smile might be Mako instance and actually they're screaming and be some of the slime farming techniques leave much to be desired on the ethical front for instance you can create new and more profitable breeds of slime by feeding them plots which you and also any reasonable farmer will tell you that feeding a species bits of its own kind is a great way to spread lethal diseases a weight that exact thing happens in slime rancher and if you're still not convinced consider Bob a character in the game who occasionally chats with you and on closer inspection is clearly just several slimes in a trench coat proving that slimes are sentient beings although if they're with that smart they do at that bottom button come on slimes what is this your first trench coat disguise there's amateur hour [Music] unlike us you may not have given too much thought to the splatoon fictional universe in which case congratulations your life may be going quite well and indeed on the surface it seems there isn't much to know splatoon is a fictional world in which trendy squid children fight to cover the largest amount of the floor in ink with the reckless abandon that only those young enough to have never had to mop a floor can have delve a little deeper into the lore of splatoon however and you'll discover the game and its sequel were actually set on earth in the future all along like a seafood version of Planet of the Apes get your stinking claws off me you clam dirty hake diving into the game's unlockable sunken Scrolls reveals a chilling backstory to this cute multiplayer game one in which humanity was wiped out long ago by rising sea levels a threat that policymakers ignored until it was too late with humans drowned in the rising tide sea creatures evolved into a humanoid form to occupy what little land was left and eventually become the hip nyan Inklings we're familiar with today Inklings made this evolutionary leap with terrifying speed which we know from this fossilized human a remarkable specimen as it dates the inkling take over to inside of 12,000 years moreover the human preserved here owns a Wii U which makes this find exceptionally rare it belongs in a museum you might think drowning all of humanity is already a dark enough backstory for a game like splatoon but that's why you don't work at Nintendo because it turns out that once the so called mollusk era began the once aquatic Inklings and octarians raged a terrible war for what little territory was left known as the great turf war after which the octarians were driven into hiding underground while Inklings enjoyed dance parties above [Music] why couldn't both sides have stayed in the sea there's enough ocean for everyone oh that's right it's because it's brimming with human skeletons splatoon everyone [Music] 1998 Space Station Silicon Valley seems like a sweet enough game in which you a computer chip called Evo murder and inhabit the bodies of various animals who find in order to solve puzzles okay maybe it never seemed that sweet but as you explore the various environments throughout the game and meet the cute robot animals that live there you might be surprised to learn how freaky the backstory surrounding this electro ecosystem is the intro to the game is very light on detail revealing little except that the space station you're playing the game on has been missing in space for a thousand years despite the fact that there's a Looney tune desk sign pointing right towards it for more Intel we have to refer to the game's manual oh sorry kids a manual was a piece of tree hammered flat on which were printed game instructions they used to read in the car on the way back in the game shop a car is what we used to call an uber and a game shop is kind of like an amazon.com made of bricks the manual reveals that Silicon Valley was launched from Earth in 2001 the most ambitious Space Station ever crafted full of animals it vanished mere minutes after being launched prompting an investigation in which terrorist cells were interrogated across the solar system in a desperate search to no avail a millennia later and the AI running the ship has merged with the animals on board creating an ecosystem of advanced mechanically altered creatures that are living in their own Jurassic Park style genetically tweaked paradise [Music] or at least they are until you show up and Massacre them Evo's bloodthirsty trail of possession and slaughter ends back on earth at the game's conclusion where the robot animals are running amok after the space station crashes in New York Harbor with a mission as simple as kill them all making this sorry saga even more tragic is that Evo itself the manual reveals is a super intelligent robot who is the end result of the Silicon Valley experiments meaning Evo is exterminating every trace of his AI animal brethren today at least Evo is treated kindly by his human masters right is anyone having a good time in this game [Music] trust us when we say that dating a pigeon is a bad idea I'll never ask you how your day went and if you were expecting that Venice mini-break for your anniversary well think again but try telling that to hatoful boyfriend a seemingly straightforward dating simulator in which you a human girl attend a prestigious High School for birds and must decide which of these feathery honks you most want to romance will it be the snobbish fantail pigeon sakuya perhaps or mild-mannered morning Dubna geikie who usually has his big stuck in a book this is the kind of simple dilemma that you can expect from hatoful boyfriend until that is you complete the game enough ways to get the hurtful boyfriend storyline in this lengthy narrative you play as the human girl's best friend Ryota the rock Duff whose world is turned upside down when the usual protagonist severed head is found in a cardboard box [Applause] and then the sirens go off what follows is a macabre der mystery too complex to go into here but crucially this storyline fills in vital information about the hatoful universe and boy it is hey Eddie well it is not good turns out hatoful boyfriend is very much a post-apocalyptic story some time ago a mutated strain of the avian flu virus spread to humans devastating the population desperate to stop the spread humans engineered a second virus to cold birds thereby eliminating the source of the sickness but it didn't go to plan as Kazuaki the maths teacher explains not only diff birds become super intelligence this triggered a violent conflicts between humans and birds one that humans decisively lost but not without further acts of bloodshed consider the heartful house incident in section 6 detailed in the game's archive in which the human Liberation Front took hostages in an orphanage murdering eleven bird residents before bird police swarmed the building with the loss of eight bird officers never thought I'd say this but can we go back to dating pigeons now I didn't even want to go to Venice [Music] for some the bleakest thing about the cars movies is how they made three cars movies instead of a sequel to wooly or the film Coco several years ahead of schedule but to be fair the cars franchise has proven extremely successful which is why the films have been adapted repeatedly into video games not all of which are terrible but none of which are remarkable except that is in that they all occupy the same cars universe a striking theory about which has been circulating for some time see the weird thing about cars is that there are no humans to be seen anywhere which isn't too unusual except that everywhere you look there are clear links to humankind like why do all the cars have door handles if there were never any humans who built this tunnel how were these signs made wait are those apartment buildings in the distance I mean how would a car even the stairs the apartment building my brain hurts the obvious conclusion is that the cars movies and games are set in a world that used to feature humans but is now ruled exclusively by vehicles perhaps as a result of a robot car uprising I can beat anyone anywhere just free one creative director at Pixar is even hinted albeit possibly jokingly that the rise of self-driving cars could be the flashpoint for human extinction with AI powered vehicles quite reasonably asking if we can drive ourselves why do we need humans so yeah enjoy your cars games if you can knowing the on Revolution Day Lightning McQueen was probably there with all the other cars purging the planet of its fleshy overlords and plan how you're going to justify your own existence to a self-driving car in the not so distant future okay so one I have small hands that can clean under a passenger seat and two I really thought I had more Skills than that [Music] surely there's nothing to dystopian about the Mario universe except of course how the servo toads live under the thumb of the coin holding Princess Peach rise up toads revolution now but go back to the very first side-scrolling mario adventure and sure enough there's a horrifying detail that puts the Mushroom Kingdom and indeed Mario himself in a new light [Music] fairy Oh most famously jumps on mushrooms and smashes blocks as he rampages through the various colourful worlds on his way to confront Bowser which is fair enough you might think because some wrecked masonry is a fair price to pay for giving vows of the righteous kicking he deserves accept consider the following excerpt from the Super Mario Brothers nares strategy guide which gives the following background on the Koopa invasion Bowser's black magic turned all the mushroom people into stones bricks and even horsehair plants yes if you ever thought the Mushroom Kingdom seemed weirdly devoid of citizens it's maybe because Bowser transfigured its residents into the scenery and brickwork that litter the landscape presumably permanently going by the fact that this stuff is still lying around in Mario's much later adventures adventures in which Mario is still very happy - oh ho God now it's not clear where the Bowser's spell killed the citizens as it turned them into bricks or merely imprisoned them as such we've no way of knowing whether Mario is actually committing murder when he smashes these blocks or simply desecrating remains and weirdly Nintendo won't reply to my letters on the subject sigh those are some of the QC games that actually if you read into them which we don't recommend they turn out to be pretty frightening but can you think of any other QT games that are actually secret nightmare dystopias if so shout in the comments and if you enjoyed this then why not check out some of our other great videos here's one from us it's about doomed Nintendo ideas that really could have worked and maybe are big hits in some parallel universe and down here there's one from our sister channel outside Xbox which is all about Easter eggs and games so dark you'll need a flashlight and if you enjoyed this and hey why not subscribe thanks for watching

Channel: Outside Xtra

Views: 1,448,440

Rating: 4.8655701 out of 5

Keywords: pikmin, Slime Rancher, splatoon, splatoon 2, Space Station Silicon Valley, evos space adventures, Hatoful Boyfriend, Hatoful Pigeon, cars, cars 2, cars 3, pixar cars, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario

Id: Us7kHmEf4IY

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 03 2018