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Some developers just want to watch you suffer! We count down the video games that were designed to punish you for just buying them. From the intentionally awful Meme Run and Don't Buy This, to the wonky controls of Surgeon Simulator, Getting Over It, and Manual Samuel.
And yeh, we talk about The Day Before.
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Most video games are of course intended to entertain the player and get those dopamine receptors firing off in all directions
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to ensure they remain glued to the screen for as long as possible. But not all games have quite such lofty goals in mind
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Sometimes there's a clear active desire on the part of the developers to make players suffer and even punish them for the very act of opening their wallets
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and buying what they had to offer. Because I'm Sy, this is WhatCulture and these are 10 video games that punished you for buying them
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The internet is an ever evolving space, but to stay safe, stay in control and save big
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months free. Just scan the QR code in this video or click the link below and it's all yours. 10
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Meme Run Let's kick this list off with a game that's unabashedly a troll in video game form
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I mean heck look at it, there is a troll face staring at you the entire time
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It is of course 2014's Wii U exclusive endless runner, Meme Run
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As its title suggests, this runner is meme-themed, with the player navigating a series of memed-packed levels
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Pre-release sentiment criticised the game's evident low quality, prompting 20-year-old developer Jordan Shewitt to respond
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that the game itself was a feat of trolling before dubbing it Game of the Year 2014
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and I suppose he is entitled to that opinion, but I don't think Geoff Keighley is going to be talking about this game anytime soon
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Basically, the developer made an intentionally poor game for the lols, which in tandem with universally poor reviews really only left players to blame
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if they dared to shell out five bucks to play it. But they didn't have long to do so as Meme Run was removed from the Nintendo eShop
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less than three months after release, when the creator of the Trollface meme, artist Carlos Ramirez
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filed a copyright takedown claim. Ah, what a shame. Number nine, don't buy this
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When a game's title straight up tells you not to buy it, you can't really fault anyone else when you fork over your hard-earned moolah
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for a disc full of near-literal poo-poo. Case in point, we have Don't Buy This
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a 1985 collection of, to quote the box art, five of the worst games ever
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Publisher Firebird decided to take the very worst games submitted to them for consideration
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and bundle them into an anthology on the ZX Spectrum, priced at around £2.50, admittedly only about a tenner in today's money
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All the same, anyone miffed by the end result being nothing more than a low-effort collection of the naffest games imaginable
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couldn't really complain to Firebird, who not only used the game's awfulness as a marketing hook
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but even encouraged players to pirate the anthology instead. Hilariously, Don't Buy This pulled off a reverse psychology coup by becoming a major commercial success for the company
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making it slightly baffling that a planned sequel with working titles including Don buy this too don buy this again and don This Either never materialising Number 8 Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy Bennett Foddy made a name for himself developing
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maddeningly difficult games such as QWOP and GRIP, which relished in their own unintuitive
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control schemes. But Foddy well and truly outdid himself with 2017's Getting Over It. The game
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casts players in the role of a man residing inside a large metal pot for some reason who must use a
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sledgehammer for some reason to propel himself up a steep treacherous mountain and reach the highest
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point again for some reason for starters the controls are intentionally finicky making it
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incredibly easy to misjudge or mistime a movement and to rub salt into the wound the game has no
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checkpoints meaning you need to start from the beginning every time you fail oh in case that's
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not bad enough foddy himself waxes philosophical about disappointment and missed opportunities
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whenever you screw up, which really just makes the experience that much more emotionally draining
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Sure, getting over it does have fans and it's a fun experience for a short while
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but unless you're a sublimely patient human being, you're really just forking over cash to become intensely angry
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Number seven, Airplane Mode. In case you haven't had enough of being shot through the skies in a tin can
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full of other people's farts in real life, Airplane Mode lets you repeat the experience in digital form
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The game's thoroughly sarcastic Steam page description says that it delivers all the thrills of a real-time six-hour commercial airline flight in coach
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which really says everything that needs to be said. This one seems coincidentally topical with all the talk, at least right now, about raw-dogging flights
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Have you seen this? Going on long flights and kind of sort of bragging that you didn't use the in-flight entertainment
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and you just sat there bored in your own brain for hours at a time
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Well, now you can do that digitally. You don't even need to buy a ticket
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You can raw dog flights at home. Because yes, this is indeed an extremely boring simulation
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of what it's like to take a long-haul flight with, quote, exciting events
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including random incidences of turbulence, busted Wi-Fi, screaming babies, and delays. All the good stuff
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Quite why even the most diehard aviation enthusiasts would subject themselves to this
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and pay for the pleasure no less is anyone's guess. For extra insanity, why not load it up on your Steam Deck
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or portable gaming device of choice while taking an actual flight. Number six, the Stroke the Animal franchise
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Developed by the shamelessly monikered outfit Game Achievements Limited, the Stroke the Animal franchise is a collection of no effort games
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in which you pay a few bucks to stroke an animal. Hamsters, dogs, hedgehogs, snakes, parrots just repeatedly hammer the X button and that's it
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In reality, as the developer's name clarifies, the games are basically paid platinum trophies in thinly veiled disguise
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All of the trophies involve nothing more than pressing a single button in order to stroke your animal of choice and you unlock trophies at regular intervals until you hit 2 strokes at which point you pop the plat Because this takes less than 10 minutes Stroke the Animal as a franchise
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has one of the highest trophy completion rates in the PlayStation ecosystem. And yeah because these
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titles are so transparently offering platinums for pay many are baffled that Sony haven't stepped
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in and removed them from the service. But the thing is you see the developer TJ Gardner has
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raked in 280,000 pounds from the games and tony takes a 30% cut of that which amounts to about
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84,000 pounds for very little work so you could probably understand why they're still available
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all the same these games are basically mocking players and their timeless fixation with hoovering
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up digital trophies making them a few bucks poorer while supporting their compulsive behavior
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number five rock simulator here's a game so utterly pointless it was even widely accused of
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being a secret crypto miner upon release. But alas, Rock Simulator is precisely what it says on the tin
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a game where you get to see what it feels like to be a rock across a series of picturesque locations, and that's it
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Progression is achieved by just sitting there and soaking in the sights. Sit there long enough and you'll level up
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which will earn you currency to buy in-game skins. That's really all the gameplay boils down to in Rock Simulator
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because of course you're a rock, so why would you be able to do anything else
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Even accepting that the game can be bought for a pittance, all you're doing is giving money to an anti-game
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that laughs at the very notion of exchanging your hard-earned dough for an actual gaming experience
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And unlike stroking animals, getting to level 5,000 in Rock Simulator and getting all the achievements along the way takes a lot longer
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So God help you if that's what you set out to do. Number four, Manual Samuel
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Though absolutely one of the better games on this list in that it's an honest-to-God attempt at making an actual game
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Manuel Samuel feels no less torturous as a result. Players take control of Samuel, who makes a deal with death
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that he'll be given a reprieve of his demise if he can manually control his body for 24 hours
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By which I mean you are now aware of where your tongue is in your mouth
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You're welcome. I'm so sorry. Players are left to perform every mundane action possible
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blinking, breathing, and so on, and this quickly becomes nothing short of infuriating
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In case it somehow isn't clear, the game is 100% in on the joke
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and Manuel Samuel is clearly made with enough passion and artfulness that one can't simply deem it a lazy cash-in like other games mentioned
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However, the artificial difficulty of its unwieldy control still makes it a hair-pulling slog to get through
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even at just two hours long, which it seems is probably the point of the entire experience
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3. My Summer Car My Summer Car is the game to test how much you love automobiles
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Because it push all but the most devoted of petrol heads to the frayed fringes of their sanity The basic goal is to build a car from scratch but the game offers virtually zero assistance in guiding the player Yes you need to figure out everything yourself
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or more likely just use a guide but that's before we even get into the tuning and maintenance of
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said car which is a cluster migraine waiting to happen in its own right. Though the mind-boggling
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attention to detail on offer is undeniably laudable players are less likely to delight in the human
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life management aspects as you also need to keep the player alive by feeding and watering them
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And so for anyone who heard the name My Summer Car and expected a nostalgic, easygoing car building sim, this is basically the exact opposite of that
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Number two, The Day Before. It stopped short of calling itself Don't Buy This
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but The Day Before may as well have been called Red Flag Simulator, given the multitude of
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pre-release indications that the open world extraction shooter wouldn't meet expectations. While it earned a wealth of buzz online after being revealed in early 2021
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there was much scepticism from the general games press and players alike
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that the small dev team would be able to deliver on the promises of its post-apocalyptic MMO ambitions
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With numerous release delays and developer Fantastix's vagueness about precisely what the game actually was
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some even speculated that the day before was an outright scam. Well it did turn out to be a game when it finally released in early access last December
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but it did still feel like a scam. The title was panned for its basic gameplay and overabundance of bugs
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Basically, the developer bit off way more than they could chew and within four days of release
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the day before was removed from sale with fantastic closing shop. Thankfully, everyone who bought the game was automatically refunded on Steam
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ensuring that its legacy is to basically serve as a slap on the wrist to the many who insist on blindly pre-ordering things
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If you did lose your money though, you really only have yourself to blame given how obviously the game was going to fail
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And number one, Surgeon Simulator. Surgeon Simulator might sound like a neat idea on paper
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but in reality, it's designed solely to skyrocket the blood pressure of anyone who dares to play it
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Surgeon Simulator is far from a rigorous, scientifically sound simulation of medical practice
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Trauma center, but realistic, this ain't. In the vein of something like Octodad or Goat Simulator
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it's instead a joke game in which the intentionally terrible controls make it an absolute nightmare to get anything done
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It began life as a game jam project produced for a laugh in just 48 hours
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but in light of the rapturous response to its debut, developers Bossa Studios fleshed it out into a full title
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Despite the obvious comedic value of the game's style, and the game did explode in terms of streaming
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for anyone who threw down cash hoping to experience some kind of serious-minded medically accurate simulation
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this was nothing short of a colossal letdown. Plus, given that Steam refunds weren't introduced until two years after its release
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miffed players couldn't even get their money back