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It's Just a Prank - TV Tropes

  • ️Mon Jul 01 2024

It’s Just a Prank is a Psychological Horror video game by the Bober Bros.

Everyone loves a good prank every now and then. But some can be downright mean-spirited, and some are straight-up heartless. A certain group of pranksters will push the boundaries of what is acceptable in pranking, creating misery, injury, pain, and death.

Two friends, Filip and Johan, enjoy playing pranks on their classmates and teachers; Johan is the mastermind while Filip carries them out. They start childishly enough, with shaken soda cans and whoopie cushions, but slowly Johan begins to get more and more dangerous prank ideas.

’’ It’s Just a Prank’’ contains the following examples:

  • Abusive Parents:
    • Agatha Varga has a very controlling and abusive father who beats her as punishment. Agatha is so afraid of her father that she begs Filip not to tell him she got in trouble at school, and if he asks, she tells him it was Johan's fault. When he doesn't and says it was Agatha's fault, he can hear her father shouting at her and beating her over the phone.
    • Johan Novak's relationship with his parents is more ambiguous on whether they're abusive or not. On one hand, he says that when a parent hits you, it means they love you. However, it could be that he was talking about his father hitting his mother, who he has clear disdain for. It's heavily implied that Johan's father was at least emotionally abusive to him and that he was a toxic influence, teaching him that violence against others is okay.
  • Adults Are Useless:
    • Agatha Varga’s father is horribly abusive, and his threats to both boys ultimately make things far worse between all three children.
    • Filip Melnick's mother loves him, but she largely leaves him unsupervised due to working long hours, mostly only being there to give him breakfast in the morning. As such, she doesn’t know the real extent of Filip’s situation.
    • Johan Novak's mother is unable to reign in her son, who has a skewed view of love thanks to his cruel father.
  • Ambiguous Ending: Johan visits Filip with a box of cupcakes, presumably to apologize. Although Filip hears Agatha's voice before he lets Johan in, Agatha herself isn't there, and her voice sounds like a recording, though Johan insists she is. He tells Johan to open the box and see his cupcakes, and we get a glimpse of blood beneath the box before cutting to Filip's horrified face. Johan suddenly appears beside him with a smile, and the game ends. Exactly what was in the box is ultimately left unknown, as is Filip's fate.
  • Ambiguous Situation: Was Johan perfectly imitating Agatha’s voice, or not? Was it Agatha's head in the box, a dead animal, or something else? Is Johan about to kill Filip next, or not?
  • Bad People Abuse Animals: Johan Novak has no problem killing innocent mice as a prank; he once bragged about stuffing a beaver as part of a next derby project, and it only gets worse from there.
  • Cassandra Truth: When Agatha Varga is knocked out and bleeding from the head due to one of Johan Novak's pranks, Filip Melnick angrily calls him out on his prank, stating that they're not funny anymore, and goes to get help from a teacher. Unfortunately, Pani Klubnika refuses to believe him because of his previous pranks, thinking he's trying to prank "her" next. This would lead to disaster later on.
  • Deadly Prank: The story's premise is kids who engage in increasingly violent pranks that ultimately gets someone killed.
  • Deconstructed Character Archetype: Filip Melnick and Johan Novak deconstruct the The Prankster archetype.
    • Filip is a mischievous kid who likes to play pranks at school. However, his pranks aren't considered funny, angering his classmates and teachers. He has a strained relationship with one of his friends, Agatha, because of his pranks, and his teachers are frustrated with him to the point where they do not trust his words anymore, which means he can't go to them for help when something bad happens. This leads him to realize that his pranks are going too far and aren't fun anymore.
    • Johan is a kid who likes to play pranks, but he gradually goes too far, and they start hurting people. It becomes clear throughout the game that something is very wrong with him. But even when Agatha falls, hits her head, and starts bleeding due to him tying her shoelaces together, he insists it was all in good fun.
  • Dissonant Serenity: Johan Novak spends much of the game's ending with a cheerful smile despite the horrific circumstances.
  • Enfant Terrible: The story's central characters are brutal pranksters willing to cause mayhem and hurt other kids for the sake of "a joke."
  • Everyone Has Standards:
    • Filip Melnick is a mischievous prankster who loves to play pranks with his friend Johan. But throughout the game, he becomes disillusioned with the pranks he played with his friend. At first, the pranks were harmless, like putting a whoopie cushion on a chair or switching a drink. But when the pranks cause actual harm, like getting his friend Agatha Varga beaten by her dad and getting a teacher Pani Vishnevska so in rage by him that she quit her job, he was shocked and unhappy about the harm he caused with his pranks. Finally, the breaking point happened for him on the pranks when Agatha hits her head and is knocked out because of a prank Johan did, Filip angrily calls Johan out on his actions, stating that his pranks weren't funny anymore and that their friend Agatha was hurt.
    • Johan Novak is a malicious prankster who gets joy in the harm he causes with his pranks and shows no sympathy to the people he hurts or even his friends while justifying his actions by stating that they are just pranks. However, when called out for the above "prank," Johan just stayed silent and seemed to be in shock. It's heavily implied that he comprehended the harm he caused his friend and genuinely does feel guilty for hurting her.
  • Extreme Doormat: Filip Melnick is submissive to his friend Johan Novak. The two of them are pranksters who like to play pranks on their classmates and teachers. Admittedly, Filip genuinely liked playing pranks with his friend at first; however, he soon became uncomfortable when it became clear that he was hurting his friends, classmates, and teachers with the pranks he and Johan were doing. Despite this, Filip never stops doing any of the pranks Johan asks him to do throughout the video game. Even toward the end of the game, Filip is still a little submissive by the end of the story when Johan visits his house; when Johan comes to visit and apologize, Filip only resists him for a minute before relenting and letting him in. Though in all fairness, Johan also claimed Agatha was with him and was also willing to forgive, and Filip did hear her voice.
  • Freudian Excuse: Johan likes to prank people as an excuse to hurt them, and he likes to hurt animals like rats and once stuffed a beaver. Later, we find that his parents are divorced, and his father lives in the city while he lives with his mother. He was incredibly close to his father, and it implied that his father was abusive to his mother. It's also implied that he got the toxic mindset that hurting people means loving them from his father, who said he hit his mother because he loved her.
  • Ignored Epiphany: Johan does seem to regret what happened to Agatha, being quiet when Filip yells at him and only mumbling it was supposed to be a prank, and it seems that he may be on his way to learning a lesson. However, in the game's ending, he's "pranking" Filip with something bloody in a box.
  • "Just Joking" Justification: Johan says the pranks aren’t a big deal because he’s only playing around with everyone. Even when Agatha suffers a traumatic head injury, he insists he hadn’t meant to actually hurt her.
  • Kids Are Cruel: Deconstruction with Filip and Played for Horror with Johan.
    • Filip has shown himself to be a mischievous prankster who would go too far with some of his pranks. While he has shown himself to be a good kid despite his mean streak, his pranks have caused his classmates and teachers to be angry and lose trust in him.
    • Johan showed himself as a prankster and was more malicious than his friend Filip. But slowly and surely, it's been shown throughout the game that there's something really wrong with him and that his cruelty is more than that of a normal child. He would go too far with his pranks, and unlike his friend, who is remorseful when someone is actually hurt, he would be indifferent and think the pain he caused was funny.
  • Lack of Empathy: Johan doesn't show any remorse or sympathy for the emotional or physical pain his pranks cause, justifying that it's all just joking around.
  • No Sympathy: The teachers, Pani Vishnevska and Pani Klubnika, show their students Filip and Agatha no sympathy when they are distressed. To their credit, Filip and Agatha are troublemakers in their eyes, with Filip pulling pranks and Agatha interrupting the class in the past, so their lack of sympathy towards them has some understanding. Tragically, those two don't realize that another student, Johan, has been encouraging Filip to play pranks and framing Agatha for some of his actions, meaning they've been taking their anger out of the wrong students.
  • Rage Breaking Point: Pani Vishnevska initially ignored Filip's pranks and viewed them as childish, but after Filip threw three paper balls at her, she snapped. Pani Vishnevska Angrily called him out for all the trouble he caused and stated that he was no better than all the horrible people in the world outside of school. Pani Vishnevska decided that she would not take it anymore and quit her job as a teacher.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: Pani Vishnevska finally ups and quits after several paper balls are thrown at her, having been frustrated with Johan and Filip's pranking for a long time.
  • The Scapegoat: Johan often uses Filip this way in his pranks, coming up with an idea for a prank himself but pushing Filip to actually do the dirty work. This leads to Filip getting all the blame.
  • Shout-Out: There's a few Gachimuchi memes in the game, from Mrs. Vishnevska's classroom having a poster that depicts the late Billy Herrington but Filip's room also having a The Terminator-style poster with the title "The Gachinator".
  • Teacher's Unfavorite Student: Played for Drama. Filip is becoming heavily disliked by his two teachers because he pranks them and his classmates. This results in Filip not being believed when he complains about Johan's genuinely dangerous pranks.
  • Two-Teacher School: Justified. The school the main characters attend appears to have only two teachers: an old teacher named Pani Vishnevska and a younger one named Pani Klubnika. However, this is understandable because the setting is implied to be a poor neighborhood in a poor country.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Pani Klubnika's refusal to believe Filip or check to make sure he wasn't lying caused the death of one of her students.