Behold, Glitches That Turn Video Games Into Endless Terror
Between relentless microtransactions and early-access releases that only allow early access to a broken piece of shit, video game enthusiasts have some legitimate complaints these days. But while no sane person on this or any other Earth will stand up to defend microtransactions, we can and will defend the glitches, as long as they're entertaining. Some bugs can be harmless, others are downright hilarious, but a few are true horrors, warping the world so drastically that you'd think you switched genres straight into Silent Hill. Look at ...
The Mountains Of Mutilated Horses In Red Dead Redemption 2
In Red Dead Redemption 2, you play a ruthless gunslinger, a grizzled criminal without any love in your heart for goldurned anyone. Well, with one exception: your horses, your steeds, your stalwart companions on this dusty road called life. So it would be a bit jarring, then, to see these noble animals burned and flayed like an ill omen of the cowboy apocalypse.
Right in time for Valentine's Day, RDR2 players began discovering massive piles of dead horses lying in the middle of roads. As if that wasn't creepy enough, it seemed that these eldritch equine demons, while certainly not alive, weren't quite dead either. One Redditor reported that players "can't shoot the piles of burned rotten dead horses but if you shoot near them they make loud noises." They didn't elaborate on the sound, but we imagine it was somewhere between a neigh and the ethereal screeching of the void.
The likely culprit behind this horse-pocalypse was a recently discovered glitch that somehow gave players the Christlike power to duplicate fish in their horse's saddles. Rockstar quietly fixed that issue, which heavily reduced the game's spawn rate to limit access to animals and NPCs. That's a bland way of saying that foolish mortals defied the laws of the Universe, only to have their folly returned to them tenfold.
Related: 6 Video Game Glitches Scarier Than Anything Done On Purpose
Online Shooters Can Turn Players Into Giant Freaks
Online shooters can be tense. Your heart's in your throat, eyes darting around the screen, fearful that behind every corner is a killer waiting to teabag your corpse. And that's before your enemy's King-Kong-sized head appears from behind a skyscraper.
A rare glitch can make it so that a multiplayer shooter spawns a giant player, as if there are Super Mario mushrooms hidden somewhere in the Battlefield franchise. In Battlefield: Hardline, kaiju-like killers can stalk the land, their giant heads scanning the field for morsels to devour:
In Battlefield 3, soldiers can get so big that their eyes pop out in sheer amazement:
Fighters in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds can also go mano-a-giant-mano with an oversized foe. But in this game, they're not mere giants, but horrific mutants who've burst out of their skins:
It's like Goofy guest-starring in a very disturbing episode of Attack On Titan.
Related: The 8 Creepiest Glitches Hidden In Popular Video Games
Decapitated Enemies Can Still Come After You InLike any good hack-and-slash game, Skyrim allows you to sever body parts with a critical hit. You can even unlock a special ability whereby you backhand an enemy's head clean off their shoulders. But because this is a Bethesda game (i.e. buggier than a freshman dorm room), sometimes these enemies don't get the memo that they've lost their noggins, and will simply rise again to Sleepy Hollow you.
Even the executioner from the game's opening scene has a hard time keeping his beheadees from running around like decraniated chickens after sentencing.
Even more gruesome, this fatal flourish can get allies decapitated by accident. Not to worry, though, as they are subject to the same cockroach magic, and will gladly keep standing / rolling around on the ground by your side.
You don't even need to chop a head. It can simply ... drop off. Like yours. Luckily, despite it not being screwed on, you can't lose it, as the skin and errant hair on your neck still drag it around.
In Mount & Blade: Warband, The Whole Sky Turns Into A Terrifying Face
Some glitches are barely noticeable, like a subtle clipping error, a quick lighting flicker, or an off-purple NPC (when obviously the NPC is supposed to be true purple). But it's hard to ignore a glitch when it turns the entire sky into one giant stretched-out face.
Yep, this is what players of medieval RPG Mount & Blade: Warband saw when they ceased their warbanding to gaze up at the stars and marvel at the wonders above:
The glitch appears to be an error wherein the sky texture is accidentally replaced with that of a random face texture, making it look like the heavens themselves are cosplaying Jabba the Hutt. It could've been worse; the game could've switched it with a texture of one of the game's many horse asses.
Related: 7 Creepy Video Game Easter Eggs You'll Wish We Never Found
Cutscenes Won't Let Poor NPCs Die
In the world of Assassin's Creed -- where at any given moment, some dude might pop out of a hay cart and stab you to death with his wrist-knife -- death by hanging probably seems like a pretty mellow way to go. But one special NPC found out the hard way that his developers forgot to implement any neck-breaking (or air-breathing) physics, leaving this dude both literally and figuratively hanging.
We knew the cops of Grand Theft Auto V were tenacious, but it turns out they'll even follow you into scripted events. Trigger a cutscene while in the middle of a chase, and there's a chance the cops won't stop shooting. And since it's impossible to die in a cutscene, poor Michael can't even relax at home, because he's getting his weight in bullets pumped into his ass by the world's most determined firing squad.
When one wannabe vampire in Stalker: Shadow Of Pripyat decides to go out on his own terms, the buggy game doesn't merely make him eat his gun, but every single bullet as well. Seconds after he unloads an entire clip into his chin, to no avail, he slumps down to the ground, too depressed to stand, but otherwise apparently unharmed.
Strangely enough, in Mortal Kombat X, not being able to die isn't a bug, but a feature. When the game introduced Jason Voorhees as a guest character, they kept things canon by making him immortal. You can actually see him resurrect at the end of a lost match. Even if you finish him off with a fatality, Jason gets right back up, legs be damned.
Or head be damned ...
Truly, we are all damned.
Tiagosvn is always eager to read about insane glitches on his Twitter. E. Reid Ross has a book called BIZARRE WORLD that's on store shelves as we speak. Or you could just order it now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble and leave a scathing/glowing review.
For more, check out 4 Glitches That Turn Video Games Into Horror Movies:
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