18 Times Video Games Broke The Fourth Wall

Hideo Kojima's games are rife with fourth wall-breaking moments, but some of the best come from the first Metal Gear Solid. The fight with Psycho Mantis is a particular favorite, as his mind-reading powers don't just affect Snake within the game, but also appear to affect the player, as well.

By reading the players' inputs, it appears as though Psycho Mantis is reading their thoughts. If the player has other Konami games on their memory card, he'll mention them during the fight. He's only defeated when the controller is unplugged from the first-player port and plugged into the second-player port, preventing him, according to the game's fiction, from reading Snake's mind. The scene is all about breaking the fourth wall as Psycho Mantis toys not just with the character, but the player, as well.

It's hard to articulate the myriad ways that Undertale breaks the fourth wall without spoiling some of its best and most surprising moments. Sometimes it's subtle, such as characters like Sans and Flowey saying lines that could apply either to the character or the player themselves, and sometimes it's more overt, such as Flowey's references to alternate playthroughs and watching the ending on YouTube.

But the game itself is also a meta-narrative, challenging the player's ideas about pacifism in video games by changing game files to permanently reflect your choices. Once you've completed the genocide route, for example, you can never again get the true good ending - the game remembers what you did to all those lovable figures, and reminds you with a haunting image that you're not as altruistic as you pretend.

It's hard to pick a single fourth-wall-breaking moment from The Stanley Parable, because the entire game is based on the strange notion of freedom of choice within a system that's designed by others - also known as "playing video games."

While you play an office worker, Stanley, who may or may not refuse to follow instructions, the narrator chides you for your inability to do what's asked of you. Impressively, the game seemingly has a response for every choice you make - including when you escape through a window and have a brief moment of thinking you've done something the game didn't account for, until the narrator chimes in that, no, this too was all part of the design.

Horror games playing with sanity mechanics is as old as horror games themselves, but Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem took that trope to a whole new level. Inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, in which the protagonists often go mad as they learn more details about the world, Eternal Darkness likewise makes the game more difficult as your sanity meter decreases.

But that difficulty isn't from more enemies or more powerful attacks - along with a tilted camera and strange noises, the game also weaves in graphical errors and fake crashes that affect the player, not the protagonist. Because these glitches are easily mistaken for the real thing, players might mistakenly restart their consoles to get rid of them - possibly decreasing their real-life sanity meters after discovering they've been tricked.

The Arkham series attracted a lot of attention for finally making a Batman game that really feels like Batman, complete with his detective skills as well as his combat. But that's not all - Scarecrow deploys fear gas against the eponymous hero, plunging him into a nightmare world. Only it's not just Batman who's affected by the gas - it actually appears to turn the game off after a series of graphical glitches reminiscent of the Xbox 360's infamous "Red Ring of Death."

The fear gas isn't just for the hero, but for the player, as well, and it's not until the game reloads itself with a tweaked opening cutscene in which the Joker takes Batman's place that it's revealed to all be part of the joke.

SCP Containment Breach is based on the SCP Foundation wiki, a collaborative short fiction setting based on the activities of a mysterious organization that collects powerful supernatural artifacts, creatures, and otherwise unknowable objects.

In the game, you guide a test subject through randomly generated rooms, avoiding the artifacts and specimens that await there. If you need a break, you can pause the game, but that's where the wall-breaking comes in. Pause for too long and the game will simply unpause itself, giving you the message, "Stop Hiding." After all, the game is about fear, and the in-game protagonist certainly can't take a breather.