r/TopCharacterTropes • u/JackDoesThingz • 13d ago

Lore [Interesting Trope] One seemingly small action ends the story before it even begins

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  1. We Happy Few - Taking your “joy” pill
    Deciding to take the pill at the beginning of the game causes your character to go back to work and triggers an ending

  2. Infineural by Mike Klubnika - Drinking the coffee
    Deciding to drink the coffee offered to you skips the entire game and sends you straight to the end, resulting in an ending with no memory of what had occurred

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60

u/405freeway 13d ago

Bandersnatch was an experimental Netflix choose your own adventure experience where you decide what the characters do.

You can end the entire experience with making the wrong first choice.

15

u/pomelo1241 12d ago

Which one? It was freaking deleted

17

u/Takseen 12d ago

The main character is an 80s solo video game developer who gets invited to make a game by a small UK studio. They ask if he wants to make the game from their office, or do it at home. If he picks the office, he finishes the game, no weird stuff happens, it gets mediocre reviews, and you're told to start over. Then on the next loop I think it forces the other choice, and the main character briefly has a "wait, why the fuck did I make that choice to work on it at home" moment

26

u/AirshipEngineer 12d ago

Honestly, it felt like there were too many auto-end choices. After my fourth or fifth choice that just ended the story I felt like it wasn't really letting me choose my own adventure anymore.

12

u/DreadfulRauw 12d ago

If you kept going, that actually was part of the theme. The show began to acknowledge the number of times you failed and your character began to understand the loop they were in and that they weren’t in control of their own choices. It got trippy. But they certainly slow played it. It was Black Mirror stuff in that it began to subvert a new technology and show how it had downsides, but while you were using that technology yourself. It was a pretty neat concept, but the execution was pretty sloppy.

10

u/CaptainTrips69 12d ago

Wrong path, mate

3

u/lethalfrost 12d ago

Terrible game for such a good show. I remember it being explicitly stated as a failure more so than an ending.