Deconstruction Game - TV Tropes

To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.

• Shadow of the Colossus: Boss Battles and Boss Games. What little bit of plot the game has makes most players question whether they're really doing the right thing by killing the bosses.

• Flower, Sun and Rain: Sidequests, convenient puzzles, event flags and adventure game mechanics in general. The game, and often even the characters, will deliberately waste your time while your actual mission is to stop a terrorist from blowing up a plane. No one's really clear on why you need to solve math puzzles at every turn, either, but they seem to accept it as normal. In the end, your reward is mostly mockery.
• Harvester: A deconstruction of Evil Is Cool and Video Game Cruelty Potential. However, it's not an anti-video game tract relying on heavy-handed moralizing, but actually a mockery of the accusation that video game violence causes real violence by making the violence cartoonishly bleak, unrealistic, and improbable to follow through on. Even the bad ending outright states that censorship of otherwise fictional violence is moronic.
• _iCEY._: The narrator will not so subtly hint that your whole purpose in the game is to kill the "final" boss, and that you should ALWAYS follow the floating guide arrows, and NEVER stray from the path laid out before you. In actuality, disobeying the Narrator and breaking the game flow is the only way to uncover the true ending... among other things.
• MadWorld deconstructs the very type of entertainment it displays. The people that enjoy watching it are shown to be cruel and almost outright amoral (the closest thing to an exception is Lord Gesser, and it's only because Deathwatch has become a spectator sport for gambling, not because of the innocent people that die to set it up), and the cutscenes outside the plot keep reminding the player just how horrific the events that had to take place to set up Death Watch were and how terrible the people setting it up were.
• META (2005): Amateur adventure game design.
• Pyst was meant to be a deconstruction of Myst by showing the game's world to have degenerated into a glorified tourist attraction, but that didn't completely pan out due to it being more of a half-hearted Shallow Parody.
• The Stanley Parable deconstructs linear games that Railroad the player while giving the illusion of a living, explorable world. The creator of the game explains, "You will make a choice that does not matter. You will follow a story that has no end. You will play a game you cannot win." The HD remake also deconstructs the line between author and narrator, narrators themselves, and binary morality and lose-lose morality plays.
• Takeshi's Challenge was specifically designed to piss off the type of completionists and Easter Egg hunters who would beat a spectacularly bad game just to see if they could.

• Bushido Blade deconstructs the weaponized fighting game genre: there are no life bars, weapons are wielded realistically, attacks can cripple your opponent, and it only takes one good hit to win a fight. In other words, a realistic take on swords and other weapons in combat. And unsurprisingly, characters bringing guns to a sword fight will be the hardest to face.
• Divekick deconstructs the mechanics of a fighting game, by simplifying it to just two buttons: one to jump, and other to divekick.

• BioShock deconstructs several gameplay mechanics as part of a Genre Deconstruction of shooter/RPG hybrids like System Shock and Deus Ex. Mission Control, Notice This and But Thou Must! are a product of being under Trigger Phrase-induced mind control, and Death Is a Slap on the Wrist because you're the son of Andrew Ryan and the game's resurrection devices are keyed to your genetic code as a result — thus making you the perfect puppet to carry out the whims of the Big Bad.
• Cruelty Squad deconstructs power fantasy open-ended first person shooters. Instead of playing as a stoic, invincible super-badass who can shrug off gunfire like no problem and sneak through any heavily guarded compound, the main character of Cruelty Squad is a deeply flawed and depressed loner who dies in just a few hits. The main character murders hundreds of enemies and kills powerful people, not out of some grand quest or moral obligation, but because its his job and he treats it as such. Lastly, the world is a contrast to the inviting, intricate and detailed environments of triple-AAA gaming, instead taking place in an actively hostile and uncomfortable environment with Alien Skies, warped textures, and a horrific screeching soundscape. In essence, while those games seek to provide an accommodating and enticing experience, Cruelty Squad is all about breaking the player down and getting under their skin.
  • The protagonist is a clear deconstruction of common video game main characters, especially the ones common in military-themed shooters, with a background with military training, a stoic, and subdued personality, able to equip themselves with all sorts of fun upgrades, who takes orders from a dispassionate Mission Control figure. Where the main character of Cruelty Squad differs from characters of this type is that these tropes are used to point out how much of a loser he is rather than build him up as a badass. His military training was in a death squad rather than the more noble soldier occupation, and he's using his advanced training to kill for whoever pays his company the best. His silent personality is the symptom of depression and apathy at his situation in life, while the upgrades he gets destroy his body and debase him as a human. His Mission Control is also rarely on any meds to begin with, and sends a death squad to his apartment to kill him by accident, only to apologize and laugh it off once the protagonist escapes.
  • Many common game tropes such as Resurrective Immortality, Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000, and Equipment Upgrade are canon to how the Cruelty Squad universe works, and their implementation is pretty horrific. The player character coming back after death with a cheap 500$ penalty? Everyone else in the world can do this too, which ultimately drives many people completely insane since they can never die. The extreme ultraviolence the game revels in is part-and-parcel of this world, since everyone is immortal anyways. While dying might be painful, it's no more of an inconvenience to your targets than paying a phone bill, and ultimately renders much of the carnage you cause to be pointless. Lastly, the implants you get are useful and fun, but are often underscored with some kind of horrific effect on your body. Speed implants replace your organs, stealth suits make you literally smell like shit, heavy armor suffocates your body, and so on. In choosing to enable video game upgrades on himself, the protagonist ruins his body and becomes a mutant. In summary, the Cruelty Squad world is a place where people can never truly die, are tortured endlessly by immortal and extremely powerful beings, and slowly have their bodies and spirits transformed by the suffering they endure.
  • Most video games have their economies based around buying and selling items of fixed value. Cruelty Squad ties its economy to an extremely volatile stock market, where not only stock prices but the prices of organs and fish are prone to wild swings during and in-between missions. The stocks are also influenced by what happens in missions too. Get a mission to take out the CEO and heads of a company on the market? You better sell your investments in that company before going through with that mission, lest you lose your shirt when the stock plummets afterward.
• Duty Calls rather in-your-face deconstructs linear military shooters that center around America Saves the Day stories.
• Haze is a deconstruction of military shooters like Modern Warfare and Battlefield, along with sci-fi shooters, such as Halo. It was a failure, however, due to Executive Meddling forcing them to rewrite the plot several times until the message was completely gone.
• Receiver 2 is a general deconstruction of gun tropes. Guns are finicky, capable of jamming in a number of ways, requiring manual reloads of the magazine bullet-by-bullet, discharging if handled inappropriately, and each gun is filled with its own little quirks. Their lethality also isn't understated: Two shots from most pistols kills you, one shot from a turret's rifle-calibre bullet or your Desert Eagle kills you. The tapes you find in game frequently call out standard tropes and give realistic gun advice, recommending looking up local laws, confirming your targets, and ensuring that proper de-escalation has been followed to avoid unnecessary deaths and potential prison time.

• While not otherwise a deconstruction, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts opens with a collectable-collecting sequence played ludicrously simple.
• Braid: The classic Save the Princess story is followed to the letter, even being called out by name, until the last few levels, when your motives become increasingly questioned, and the princess is revealed as fleeing you the whole game.
• Default Dan takes every convention of the genre, and flips them around. Coins, cute enemies, cupcakes and other power-ups are bad, pits, spikes, and other normally lethal things are good, the princess kidnaps the hero's monster friend instead of the other way around... However, it's all Played for Laughs.
• DLC Quest: Overreliance on Downloadable Content.
• Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy: Checkpoint Starvation and Some Dexterity Required. Made by the same person as QWOP.
• Level Up: Leveling up in games.
• The Simpsons Game: The Crapsack World nature of living inside a video game, as well as older games becoming obsolete as newer games from the same franchise or license are made. Worth noting this game does not opt for You Bastard!, with the Simpsons family pinning the blame squarely on the creator instead of the player, with the semifinal level being a Rage Against the Author.
• Sonic the Hedgehog OmoChao Edition: Annoying Video Game Helper (This game actually has added challenge — you have to avoid everything that triggers Omochao's comments as much as possible for Rank Inflation, and for Speed Run enthusiasts, there's the fact that the timer won't freeze whenever Omochao speaks.)
• You Have to Burn the Rope: The Puzzle Boss. You can only defeat the Grinning Colossus if you know the secret move. The move is not secret. Even if you miss the Spoiler Title, the approach to the boss has a Signpost Tutorial with explicit instructions. Only Captain Oblivious could find the game challenging.
• You Only Live Once: Platformers in the vein of Mario. True to the game's name, if the protagonist or the antagonist dies, their death is permanent, and the other one of the two gets arrested depending on which of the two dies.

• The Hex posits a question regarding something very common in Haunted Technology stories, "meta" horror games, and Creepypasta especially: Why would a video game character want to kill a real human, much less their own creator? As it turns out, the video game characters are alive and their human creator ruined their lives by doing things they couldn't comprehend, such as causing their franchise to bomb by selling the property to a company that makes bad ports and remakes, or by placing them in a game series that takes a toll on their sanity with how bloodily vicious it is, or causing them to lose their job and fade into obscurity by deleting and burying all traces of their game having ever existed.

• The Illogical Journey of the Zambonis: Trial-and-Error Gameplay. The Zambonis are faced with danger with no way to know what will lead to safety and what will lead to death. The narration hammers in how horrifying it would be to be faced with unpredictable death. And no matter what choices you make, a set number of Zambonis are guaranteed to die on each screen, so the choices you make don't matter at all- the game outright ends with every single one dead.
• The Looker directly references The Witness at various points, with the intent to make fun of its Fauxlosophic Narration and "artistic" puzzles; at one point, the player is literally asked to solve a maze from a restaurant's kids menu in order to make progress.

• Needy Streamer Overload is this for the idol Raising Sim. Whereas the typical idol sim will glamorize the industry, this game extensively shows how harmful stardom can be to one's mental health and safety.
  • Ame/KAngel, the titular streamer, is a very unstable girl who only seeks fame as a substitute for a genuine human connection that her parents never gave her, and to keep away her thoughts of self-hatred. But she also gains a lot of haters, trolls, and cyberbullies who criticize her every facet in addition to fans, some of whom are equally toxic. In one ending where she reveals she has hooked up with a fellow streamer, most comments spew hatred and express betrayal for her violating her Contractual Purity, as has happened to many real life idols and streamers. In another end, she gets doxxed. And many endings have her undergo a Creator Breakdown of varying severities because of the stress of trying to please her fanbase.
  • Another thing tackled here is the relationship between the idol and their producer Player Character, which is usually shown in a purely positive light- here, P-chan and Ame's relationship is dysfunctional and outright mutually abusive in some routes, with P-chan pushing Ame's Stress and Mental Darkness to dangerous levels while Ame can use P-chan as a tool to get fame only to blame them for anything that goes wrong and abandon them if she no longer needs them. Also, P-chan is actually an Imaginary Friend created by Ame because she is that lonely.
  • The idea of the player holding a person's life in their hands is literal here — if you are not careful, you can accidentally lead Ame to any number of bad ends. In fact, most of the endings do not end well for Ame, and the good endings are the ones where she either takes a break or quits streaming altogether.

• Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness deconstructs moral choices where Evil Pays Better. The entire kingdom has been cursed so everyone is a materialistic jerkass. Even if you try to do the right thing it might end up backfiring, the developers even give an example: giving money to a church, if you didn't weaken the curse enough the priest will embezzle your donation and make things worse.
• Yoko Taro's Drakengard/NieR series is, in many ways, his critique of the JRPG genre, particularly the first games in the respective sub-series:
  • Drakengard deconstructs a variation of Level Grinding showing us just what kind of person would slaughter armies of enemies in order to strengthen his weapons.
  • NieR, in addition to deconstructing several aspects of JRPG's and "save the world" plotlines in games, also deconstructs the concept of a "dungeon" and lampshades the concept of arbitrary challenges and rules placed at certain segments in games by having the characters point out how ridiculous the "rules" of the temple they're in are. These challenges are also deliberately unfun and tedious to get through; they are, after all, traps meant to keep people out, not toys for plucky adventurers to play with.
  • Nie R Automata deconstructs many aspects of RPGs by showing they only really make sense if nearly all of the cast are robots; stat-boosting equipment comes in the form of software upgrades, you respawn after dying because your mind just downloads to a new body, status effects come from being hacked by enemies or infected by computer viruses, and much more. The typical RPG Saving the World plot is also deconstructed, as the war you spend most of the game fighting is a lie; humanity was already wiped out long before the story even began, and you and your enemies are nothing more than proxy agents in an experiment by your leaders to try and become human.
• Final Fantasy VII Remake deconstructs elements of a Video Game Remake, as it involves an underlying meta-narrative where the cast is forced to follow the plot of Final Fantasy VII at the behest of supernatural forces designed to ensure the Planet's safety. Character potentially Spared by the Adaptation? Said forces will try to get them killed. Character Death by Adaptation? Said forces will bring them back to life. It gets to the point where "destiny" becomes a major theme in the last hours of the game, and the cast's (successful) attempt at literally punching destiny in the face results in them "remaking" the story itself, but doing so may have unforseeable consequences for all parties involved.
• Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 is considered one of the most difficult games in the franchise, deconstructing the plot of the first game, where prince in exile Marth retakes his country from The Empire. Thracia pulls no punches showing what kind of hurdles Prince Leif has to overcome. His army is constantly on the run, they started with no money and have to steal weapons from the enemy, and they don't have enough manpower or resources to hold land for a significant amount of time.
• Ginormo Sword: Arguably, grinding and the emphasis on weapon upgrades.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is a deconstruction of the entire Star Wars franchise, especially the traditional Light/Dark dichotomy, as well as a variety of RPG concepts.
  • Chris Avellone is known to deconstruct aspects that he sees as flaws in franchises he works on or in the RPG genre in general. He often creates an Author Avatar that will play a major role in these works specifically for this purpose, such as Kreia in Knights of the Old Republic and Ulysses in Fallout: New Vegas.
• Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, which has been cited as a major influence on Undertale, is about a young boy who is pulled into the world of a Fictional Video Game. There, he has to undo the damage done by the Hero recklessly doing stereotypical RPG character stuff like looting people's houses for adventuring supplies and Level Grinding by needlessly killing innocent creatures. In essense, the "Hero" is by all means portrayed as a tabletop murder hobo, before the phrase was popular, with the boy coming in later to witness the consequences of his actions and attempting to solve the problems they have caused. In fact, the way to get the best ending is to refuse to keep fighting the Hero anymore after losing a Hopeless Boss Fight.
• Parameters is all about distilling an RPG to its purest bare-bones form: all the enemies and quests are represented by simple boxes and numbers and all you need to do is to click repeatedly on them. It manages to be pretty enjoyable nonetheless.
• The Modron dungeon in Planescape: Torment: Dungeon crawlers in general. Complete with enemies who don't know their motivation and leave items like, "A goody!" The game at large is a very thorough deconstruction of Protagonist Without a Past and Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. Instead of being simple gameplay mechanics, these things are the wheels that drive all character development.
  • As a whole the game serves a large-scale deconstruction of RPG tropes. Among others, the point of the game is to die, you get your name at the end of the game, there are no elves, dwarves, or swords but you do get to equip eyeballs and your own intestines, the nicest people you get to meet are undead, and so forth.
• Progress Quest: RPGs that assign players randomly generated quests and don't require any real strategy. After creating a character (which has no bearing on the game itself), the game automates grinding and fetch quests which is all the game is.
• Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale: Is primarily all about running the item shop in an RPG. You can still accompany adventurers to the dungeons though, which ends up bypassing the deconstruction potential in the Fridge Logic of tropes like Shop Fodder, by having both sides of the game feed into each other in a way that dodges the question and wouldn't be true for the average shop.
• Souls-like RPG seems to be deconstructing modern conveniences of modern videogame features. Autosaves? Death Is a Slap on the Wrist? The games uses those features against the player instead to help the player, by having valuable Experience Points dropped upon death, and if failed to be collected, it will lost. Not to mention that after death, the player character enter a weakened state that must be restored with a cost... Multiplayer? The multiplayer feature is tailored so the player, through notes function, could write either helpful or deceptive tactics, and while players can potentially help each other, "invasion" of other player's session is possible and often encouraged.
• Super Press Space to Win Action RPG 2009: RPGs in general, and overly linear Quick Time Event-heavy action RPGs in particular. As the title suggests, all the player has to do is hit space over and over to win. (The credits specify that the game was "inspired by God of War".)
• Torment: Tides of Numenera: Character Customization, Alt Itis, and the general concept of Player Characters. Your PC is the abandoned avatar of an immortal wizard who keeps himself alive and "roleplays" new lives by periodically Body Surfing to a new body, leaving the previous one to its own devices. The world is littered with castoff avatars like yourself, who've formed their own subculture and often face prejudice, while also clashing endlessly over whether they should serve or rebel against their creator. They are also inherently unnatural and destructive beings whose instinctual exploiting of the Background Magic Field damages people's minds and prods them into conflict, hence why so many people you meet have problems only you can solve and why parts of the plot only seem to truly progress when you're around. The Big Bad is actually a sentient, Precursor-created weapon designed to destroy avatars like yourself and prevent further corruption of the Tides.
• Undertale deconstructs Level Grinding, 100% Completion, and RPG combat. Experience points, leveling up, saving, and loading are all powers that your character possesses and highly relevant to the plot rather than just being gameplay mechanics. Most of the monsters you fight are harmless buffoons and normal people fighting for misguided reasons, and the Genocide Route where you kill them all anyways will not only irrevocably taint any subsequent playthroughs, but earn you frequent nasty reminders that you are going out of your way to murder everyone you come across, just to see what will happen - or even worse, just because you can.
  • The No Mercy route also can be seen as a deconstruction of playing a Villain Protagonist, especially in games with Karma Meters and/or Multiple Endings. Plenty of games that have the option of being "evil" often try to play it off for Rule of Cool, Rule of Funny, or still have you in a "lesser of two evils" situation. Not Undertale. To do a No Mercy run, you need to go out of your way to hunt down and kill absolutely everything in each area you can until a specific message pops up, and the game will make you feel horrible for it. The quirky humor of the game vanishes, replaced by a dark and dreary ambiance. The NPCs will either disappear because they're running from you in terror or treat you like the despicable scum you are. All the encounters are either pathetically easy or hair-pullingly hard so that you never get to actually enjoy yourself in battle. Your sympathies throughout the whole thing will lie with the victims. All of the game's puzzles are automatically solved (because Flowey is helping you), and all non-essential areas are warded off by force fields, so you can't do anything except fight. And most importantly, if despite all that you still go through with it until the very end, you can never "reset" your way out of the consequences - short of tampering with your computer, your sins will remain with you forever.
  • Firstly, the game completely plays with your perception of Level Grinding. Play through the game like it's a normal RPG, fighting enemies and bosses, earning exp and leveling up? Well, at the end of the game you're told that EXP stands for Execution Points, and is a measurement unit for how much pain you've inflicted on others, while LV, or LOVE as it's otherwise called in Undertale, is Level of Violence, and acts as a measurement unit of how desensitized you've become to killing. Playing this way puts you on track for the worst ending, which reveals that YOU, the player, are the real villain of the story, and every boss you mercilessly cut down was a Hero Antagonist out to stop you (with the exceptions of Toriel and Papyrus, as Toriel didn't realise your evil and Papyrus believed you can still be a good person). It also invokes Being Evil Sucks by making every fight an Anti-Climax Boss that goes down in one hit, and the two that don't are designed to be as frustrating as possible. Take a Third Option by sparing the sympathetic characters and only killing minor enemies? You're told that every monster you killed could have had friends and family, the general populace and one of those main characters, the previously mentioned Flowey, will still remember you as a mass murderer, and you get called out for being a hypocrite. The only way to achieve the best ending is through a Pacifist Run.
  • Even that contains a bit of this: the Big Bad actually hints you towards the Golden Ending because he knows that you'll want to go for it as a completionist, and through this uses you to get everyone you befriended into one place so he can absorb their souls. The game also plays with your notions of 100% Completion: the game itself begs you not to reset after achieving the Golden Ending, because you'd be taking all that happiness away from all the characters. And getting the worst ending even once permenantly taints any future Golden Ending you achieve. In other words, exploring every route the game has to offer is a very bad thing, and some paths are better off never being taken.
  • The game also plays with the concept of saving by exploring one simple question: what does saving and resetting look like to the characters within a game? One character is a genius and strong, but doesn't actually use his powers simply due to being aware of the player's save/reload powers: he knows the world is being continually reset, so he doesn't see the point of caring about anything anymore, and only steps in to save the world at the climax of the No Mercy route. Other characters are aware of what you did in earlier files, some bosses are aware of how many times you've died to them and as said above, resetting a Golden Ending file is seen as undoing everyone's happy ending. The few characters who are fully aware of the resetting treat the player as some kind of horrifying Reality Warper who torments them out of boredom. Oh, and the Final Boss can SAVE too.
  • Contrastly, the kinda-sequel Deltarune deconstructs But Thou Must!, Dialogue Trees, and Strictly Formula RPGs, showing how suffocating and bleak it would be to live in a world where choices are superfluous at most and nothing changes until a random person fulfills specific conditions. You are told straight-up that none of your choices matter and many of said choices get rescinded immediately after they were offered, starting with your customized character being thrown out to force you to play as Kris. After a while, the Railroading gets so pushy that it almost feels abusive, like the game creepily insisting that you accept everything that happens or Kris using their tone of voice to take control of their dialogue back from you regardless of the dialogue options you pick.
• Yume Nikki: Exploration and sandbox gameplay. The entire game is a Beautiful Void and there is no plot to speak of, which has prompted elaborate Fanon and Wild Mass Guessing on behalf of the players, in an attempt to invest the game with externalised meaning.

• DonPachi takes apart the concept of the One-Man Army commonly present in single-player video games, showing that in order to be able to take on enemy forces by themselves, prospective recruits have to slaughter their own military forces as training exercises. Only after seven years of this training is the player character finally fit to enter the elite DonPachi Squadron.
• Tyrian also deconstruct the concept of One-Man Army by having the supposed "good guys" (actually the enemy of a MegaCorp the protagonist ran away from), knowing how the protagonist can singlehandedly take down enemy fleets, decide to use the protagonist to cut costs as well as perpetuating the war that even the protagonist are getting sick of.

• Desert Bus from Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors deconstructs Misaimed "Realism". The game's mechanics are so "realistic" that the game is somehow less fun than it would be to actually drive a bus through a desert. Part of the point is making fun of how Moral Guardians claim video games to be ultra-realistic gore fantasies - a video game always takes some liberties with real life, or you get Desert Bus.
• Cart Life is a deconstruction of business simulators. You play the role of a small business owner attempting to start and maintain a retail business in a city. However, just like in real life, you don't get an objective menu, and there are no directions on where you need to go and what you need to do. Most importantly, it completely averts the expectation that you can pause the game by bringing up the menu screen. Just like in real life, there is absolutely no way for the player to pause the flow of time even when you are trying to read the description on a product or chat with a customer. And that is before even getting into the actual business part, in which you need to do everything from getting the products from a supermarket to getting a permit yourself, all the while trying to balance and maintain the basic needs and addition of your character. In other words, the game demonstrates just how not fun and difficult it is to run a small business (and being a new immigrant/single mother) is in real life.
• Oiligarchy does this to the notion of the Golden Ending. As per Word of God, playing optimally, like a hardcore gamer would, gets you the worst ending, Mutually Assured Destruction, since you are the Villain Protagonist after all. The happy ending has the world transition to a cleaner, more sustainable society, but that's your losing condition where you are rendered obsolete and are forced to retire. The other endings are getting fired for not expanding oil production enough, and an unintentional case of Earn Your Bad Ending where the Western nations' economy collapses.
• Viscera Cleanup Detail may itself be a cleaning simulator, but it deconstructs ego-shooters like Doom as so ridiculously bloody and brutal that it would indeed be a different, but also difficult task to clean up after such a whirlwind of carnage.

• The original Manhunt deconstructs and satirizes the conventional relationship between the player and the player character in violent video games. The protagonist James Earl Cash is being controlled from the outset by Starkweather, a weird, creepy guy sitting in a dark room in front of a computer screen, who watches him through cameras and urges him to commit unspeakably horrific acts. It's pretty obvious who Starkweather is meant to represent. And why does Starkweather urge Cash to carry out these shockingly violent murders? Because he's making a Snuff Film to sate the sick desires of people who find brutal violence entertaining (not to mention sexually arousing) — a camp that, going by his own creepy comments over the course of the game, he himself is part of.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty: Sequels with suspiciously similar premises to the original, linearity and the illusion of choice in video games, and the concept of video games as a power fantasy, among many other things.

• The climax of infamous Exploitation Game Demonophobia deconstructs the idea of resetting the game after death. Imagine you had to spend days in excruciating pain as your body was rebuilt. Imagine that you had to regularly have your mind wiped to avoid going mad from the revelation. Imagine that whoever was doing this didn't have your best interests in mind.
• Nanashi no Game uses the cursed, nameless game to deconstruct RPGs. There's no battles to win, levels to grind or heroics to engage in — you just walk around, talk to people and collect hidden items that must be found to reach the good ending.

• Both of the Kane & Lynch games are surprisingly subtle deconstructions of crime-themed action games. Both deliberately avoid glorifying violence, and instead goes out of its way to portray realistic consequences of it, such as the firefights being messy with civilians very frequently being caught in the crossfire. The two main protagonists are also portrayed as desperate, selfish and destructive, as to show how morally bankrupt one would have to be to commit the actions of the anti-heroic protagonists found in titles like Grand Theft Auto as well as how horrible they would actually be.
• kill.switch predates both Haze and Spec Ops: The Line, but it shares their focus on deconstructing military shooters. The Player Character is a mute soldier being remotely piloted by a hacker calling themselves the Controller, who works on behalf of a war profiteer. The Controller revels in the chaos his operations cause and is completely uncaring about collateral damage.
• Spec Ops: The Line is a far more successful deconstruction of military shooters compared with the aforementioned Haze, stating that, for all their pretense of gritty realism, they are still escapist, dehumanizing, unrealistic power fantasies. One sequence in particular becomes exponentially more horrifying if you've played the similar, yet more throwaway "Death From Above" level in Modern Warfare. While it's at it, it also deconstructs playing shooters as a Power Fantasy, "moral choice" systems, and the America Saves the Day trope. The achievement system lessens the impact somewhat by forcing you to complete the game repeatedly, including the railroaded dehumanizing incidents.

• Air Pressure: A romance visual novel where the male protagonist can improve his relationship with a cute girl — except that said relationship is toxic and the best ending comes from the protagonist realizing this and breaking up with her.
• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony doesn't seem to start off this way (though there is foreshadowing that it is) but the final chapter decides to deconstruct the entire Danganronpa franchise and everything that it stands for (Hope vs Despair, hope always winning, etc).
• Doki Doki Literature Club!: Dating sims, harem games, the nature of NPCs, and the divide between the player and their character. One of the non-romanceable side characters is self-aware and steadily going insane from the knowledge that she's a video game character, eventually becoming an obsessive Yandere towards the player (not the PC, the player themselves) who screws with the game's files on your computer to try and force you into romancing her, which in turn causes the rest of the girls to start going mad and killing themselves as their flaws and personal issues get Flanderized to their Logical Extreme.
• I Hate You: Dating sims. No matter what you do or how hard you try, none of the girls in the game will ever see you as anything more than an obsessed loser.
• REFLEXIA on Steam is a minimalistic half-parody Dating Sim, similar to Doki Doki Literature Club in that it deconstructs dating sims and harem games. The first part of the game features a self aware protagonist, who's date with the player quickly devolves into a mockery of the one-dimensional nature of visual novel characters, illusionary choices (with pointless game achievements to boot), and the idea of the player getting attached to a character that is literally scripted to love them no matter what. The second part of the game serves as a pseudo-reconstruction of the genres, using the protagonist (as well as the player stand-in) to more sincerely discuss themes of sex, loneliness, emotional dependency, and self-reliance.
• YOU and ME and HER is this of romance games and visual novels in general.
  • Aoi's route deconstructs the idea of "CG Hunting", that being the idea that people who read erotic VN's only do so to get to the sex scenes. Aoi shows what happens when a girl is literally reduced to being a sex object, and her plotline is appropriately disturbing since she begins turning to methods like cuckoldry in order to farm more scenes, despite the fact that she doesn't want to cheat on Shinichi, because otherwise she'll effectively vanish from existence.
  • Miyuki's "true" route further deconstructs the "CG Hunting" attitude — she essentially assaults Shinichi in a desperate bid to get the player to love her, madly believing that sex is the only thing the player wants, and that if the player wants that, they'll get it. Not only is it made clear that only an incredibly mentally-broken person would believe this, none of the sex scenes are sexy at all — they're deranged ramblings where Miyuki admits she knows nothing about YOU but still creepily thinks she can start a family, all because visual novels make the reward for loving a girl sex instead of anything deeper.
  • The game deconstructs Story Branching, especially the visual novel standard of pursuing other girls, by bringing forth a very ugly truth — that the reader's "love" for the characters is a one-sided and shallow one based on appearance and surface-level characteristics rather than anything deeper. Not only does Miyuki take the player's declaration of love extremely seriously as one would in a real relationship, she takes it very badly (as one would in a real relationship) when the player picks another girl for their looks and surface-level personality, if not "just because". In real life, anyone going for another girl while already in a relationship, based on looks or shallow interpretations of her personality, would rightfully be deemed a heartless philanderer.
  • The game further deconstructs Story Branching and Multiple Endings, especially visual novels that gloss over what happens to the character you don't choose for a romance: one reason Miyuki goes crazy is because she becomes aware that if Shinichi/the player chooses any other character, she doesn't get to have a happy ending.
  • Featureless Protagonist, Flat Character, and Audience Surrogate player characters are given the works as well: Shinichi is painfully aware of how bland and unmotivated he is, and feels that life is pre-determined. He further acts contrary to the player as a real person would — getting angry even when the player is choosing options that would say otherwise. Not only does his blandness and his contrary actions cause Miyuki to break her friendship with him if the game isn't patched, the fact that he's so shallow makes Miyuki fall in love with the player instead of the boy she thought she loved.
  • 100% Completion: At several points in the game, you're given the option to input a cheat code that unlocks every CG in the game. However, doing so renders the story permanently unplayable, a jab at players who only care about CGs in Visual Novels. To make matters worse, if you input it near the end of the game, both heroines treat it as the ultimate betrayal, since doing so essentially erases them from existence.

• Achievement Unlocked: Achievements.
• Cow Clicker deconstructed the idea of social games like Farmville, by distilling it to just the simple mechanics. You had a cow, and you can click on it after set intervals. You could click on it more often by paying real world money. And you could post it on your Facebook feed and invite friends. Despite the simple ideas the game still included a feature set that created a Meta Game with factions and meta strategy. Eventually the creator became disturbed by how popular it became, and believed that it was stealing when people actually did spend money on the game, leading to a "Cowpocalypse" end of the game.
• Don’t Kill the Cow: In order to win don't kill the cow, but your wife will starve to death as result.
• Don't Shoot the Puppy: Press X to Die.
• Execution by Jesse Venbrux can be seen as a deconstruction of Flash "assassin" games. The only way to "win" is to quit. Restarting after you've killed your target results in an "it's already too late" message and shows you the failure screen, even if you delete and reinstall the game. This is because the game records your loss in your computer's registry.
• Frog Fractions parodies Edutainment Games that are more "game" than "edutainment" by presenting a game about fractions that not only does very little to teach you how fractions work, but quickly goes wildly and hilariously off the rails.
• :the game: and REPLAYING :the game:: Cut and Paste Environments.
  • Also, This Is the Only Level.
  • Averted in the threequel.
• Help The Hero: Grid Inventory.
• Little Inferno: "Clicker games" like FarmVille. As one character puts it, the game is about burning your stuff which drops more money to buy more stuff and then the cycle just repeats itself. The dev team said in an interview the idea came from a "7 second loop of a flaming log. And [they] thought 'man, that's like a super boring game that some awful company will totally make for the Wii or smartphones.'" Furthermore, there are constant parallels in game between the game and reality. The friend sending you letters brings up the fact that you can't turn away from the Entertainment Fireplace, as though your character were addicted to it like a game, and she brings up how burning things is basically like burning time. They also mention how the fireplace is basically an escape from the cold, harsh reality outside, among other things.
• Qwop: Some Dexterity Required.
• Side Quest: Side Quests.
• Steamshovel Harry: Forced Tutorials. There is no game. The earth will be destroyed in fifteen minutes— and the tutorials take far longer!
• There Is No Game: No, really. There is no game.
• Upgrade Complete: Upgrades.
  • The sequel addresses some things they forgot the first time around. You can now upgrade the part limit on your ship, among other things (including your heart rate).
• Video Game Morality Play is a deconstructive mockery of other deconstructive games, aimed at those such as Spec Ops: The Line which overuse the You Bastard! trope to the point of pretentiousness, and whose attempts to make you feel bad depend on railroading you into the same immoral choices the game will condemn you for. It shows off how pointless the You Bastard! critique is by subjecting the player to inconsequential choices that lead to the same outcome, then putting words in the player's mouth, finding fault with everything the player does, and leading to a pretentious, "deep" ending if you choose the "Not in real life..." response to the accusation that you enjoy killing. If the player chooses the "FUCK YEAH OBVIOUSLY" response instead, the game proceeds to drop all pretenses and point out that you still have a life outside playing violent video games, too.
  • You Were Hallucinating The Whole Time is an even bigger deconstructionist mockery by adding meaningless shocking swerves to classic video games and pointing out that criticizing people for unrealistic entertainment is stupid.
• Surgeon Simulator 2013: Ditto.
• '50K Racewalker'': Played With. It looks like a Some Dexterity Required game, but after about a minute you realize it's deconstructing Fake Longevity instead.
• We Become What We Behold: Memetic Mutation and Flame War. The game demonstrates how our media's tendency to only cover things that spark outrage and the public's tendency to hold ignorant beliefs based on little evidence is very dangerous. Through the player’s actions, the society descends into a brutal race war where squares and circles kill each other in a horrifying cycle of violence. The square/circle couple who advocated peace and tolerance survive though.

• No More Heroes: Wide Open Sandboxes and Anti-Hero video game protagonists. You have a big beachside city to explore, but it's a crappy, rundown Dying Town with an ever-dwindling menial population; there's not much of anything to really do, and even less that your Player Character can affect in a meaningful way. Said PC is a massive Loser Protagonist with an overinflated ego. He wastes his life away on pointless boss battles, mini-games take the form of boring menial jobs he has to work to support his wannabe action hero lifestyle, his base is the crappy motel room he lives in, his Cool Sword is an Awesome, but Impractical laser blade that looks like a cosplay prop, and he gets upgrades and collectibles by rooting through garbage because he can't afford most of them and has to make do with whatever junk he finds.

• Pokémon Strangled Red discusses an eponymous hacked game within a Deconstruction Fic, with the plot kicked off by the implications of being able to store living creatures as data (specifically, what if those systems fail?) and what would happen if the glitch Pokémon and their Good Bad Bugs were real entities that could be called upon by anyone with the right knowledge. As one would expect, it comes at a very heavy cost.