Sign in to your TheGamer account
Video games and movies have a lot more in common than you think, especially now with the high cinematic quality and photorealistic graphics that can be achieved. But just like movies can sometimes make some very weird and embarrassing missteps in what might be otherwise a pretty solid and outstanding story, video games are not short on moments like that as well.
Related
Whether a cutscene, an entire level, a simple line of dialogue, a specific cringeworthy character, or an unusually silly or destructive game design choice, it’s easy to feel second-hand embarrassment for the developers as you encounter it. These are especially the bits seen in various games (some that even score pretty high in their reviews) where the embarrassment hits you full force.
10 Kingdom Hearts 2
Swim This Way – “A Musical For Everyone To Have A Lot Of Finny Fun”
Kingdom Hearts 2
One of the reasons Kingdom Hearts should never rid itself of Disney is because of moments like this one right here. The Atlantica level in KH2 has a very different set of rules from the previous game, as the main mechanic now becomes QTE button presses to pass various musical sections. While the iconic tracks ‘Part of Your World’ and ‘Under the Sea’ from The Little Mermaid are there, one new original song certainly made this quite embarrassing.
That would be ‘Swim This Way,’ the introductory musical number that Sora, Ariel, Donald, and Goofy perform. Created solely for Kingdom Hearts 2, this song definitely pales in comparison to the music in the animated movie, full of cringeworthy lyrics loaded with fin puns, containing a funky melody (in a bad way), and ending in “have a lot of finny fun.” The cutscene transitions and character animations don’t do it any favors either.
9 Death Stranding 2
The Pizza Chef Fight, Urination Mechanic, And Kojima Constellation
Death Stranding is one of the weirdest Triple-A games you will ever play, even weirder than Alan Wake 2, with a story that’s also mind-bending and convoluted and filled with a ton of strange characters. The sequel, On the Beach, quadruples down on the strangeness, letting you ride coffins like hoverboards and even outdoes Alan Wake 2’s We Sing with so many wacky musical numbers of its own.
Related
Love Death Stranding 2? Play These Bizarre Walking Simulators Next
Here are the best walking simulators if you love Death Stranding 2.
DS2 is still a masterpiece, filled with excellent writing, the best graphics achievable, and even a birthday celebration, but come on, requiring Sam (aka Norman Reedus) to urinate as a crucial mechanic in the game? And then the John Wick-style fight with the Pizza Chef, in which he says, “Those who dare disrespect pizza do not deserve to live,” and basically makes cooking pizza a performance art, as well as a cameo of Hideo Kojima’s face appearing as a constellation, are utterly absurd moments.
The Pizza Chef in Death Stranding 2 is modeled and performed by the legendary director of the Ghost in the Shell anime films, Mamoru Oshii.
8 New Tales From The Borderlands
‘Skateboard Score’ Team-Building Montage
-Cropped.jpg)
New Tales from the Borderlands is a follow-up to the 2014 Telltale episodic series of the same name, with a new story and cast of characters in the world of Borderlands (which also secretly connects to the previous installment). Given the low review scores, it didn’t achieve the same quality as the original, though it did have a few funny and memorable moments. L0U13 and Badass Superfan stole the show.
But one of the weirdest and most tonally jarring scenes in New Tales from the Borderlands was L0U13 discussing how the game’s relationship system will be measured as a ‘Skateboard Score’ and how everything should be rated by ‘skateboards’ (pretty stupid even by Borderlands standards). This leads to a cringey montage scene in which the song Ice Cream by Bonniesongs plays, even seeing the group do the wave at one point.
7 Atomic Heart
Nora The Fridge, And The Dialogue In General
Atomic Heart is an intriguing game that contains some elements of BioShock while set in an alternate history of the Soviet Union. The combat and skills are fairly engaging and unique, and the concept takes a distinctly different direction, blending sci-fi horror and action-adventure RPG elements together. There are a lot of strange design choices, but by far the most shocking is a fridge character named Nora.
Nora is actually your upgrade and weapons crafting system in the game, a red Soviet refrigerator AI seemingly programmed to fall in love with the protagonist, P-3. Nora makes extremely crude and awkward sexual advances in an attempt to seduce you. Pretty weird. However, in general, the dialogue written in the game, especially P-3’s vocal delivery, is cringeworthy and one of the game’s major flaws.
Quiet Dancing In The Rain
Metal Gear Solid 5 The Phantom Pain
- Released
- September 1, 2015
One Kojima moment that’s a definite “Oh no, please no” that should never happen again is Quiet’s dance in The Phantom Pain. In the wake of Gamergate and the important initiative toward better female representation in video games, Kojima controversially gave Snake a scantily-clad sniper companion with an attractive physique, who then proceeds to strip down further and playfully dance before him in the rain.
Related
Every Hideo Kojima Game, Ranked
With Death Stranding out on the PS4, this seems like a great time to rank every Hideo Kojima game ever released.
The whole sequence feels very unnecessary and overly sexualized, like a scene ripped from Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, but Kojima escaped the criticisms unscathed and got to create Death Stranding. In fact, he infamously said that everyone would be “ashamed” of themselves after learning that Quiet’s character design is like that because she breathes through her skin, thereby needing it exposed. Well, I’m still unpersuaded.
5 Resident Evil 4
Leon’s “Your Right Hand Comes Off?” Quip
The original Resident Evil 4 had plenty of embarrassing Leon S. Kennedy moments and questionable dialogue that the 2023 remake thankfully remedied, though we still admire the OG game for what it was and what it did for the future of survival horror and third-person shooters. One of the most memorable Leon Kennedy dialogue deliveries that still gives me second-hand embarrassment to this day is the “right hand” moment.
Salazar is, of course, talking about sending a Verdugo to hunt and kill Leon when saying, “I’ve sent my right hand to dispose of you.” Leon takes the opportunity to say what he believes is a snarky and smart-witted response: “Your right hand comes off?” But it lands as an incredibly weak joke that also makes him sound quite dumb for a special agent, like he doesn’t understand what a “right hand” signifies in this context.
4 Resident Evil (1996)
The “Jill Sandwich” Moment Between Barry And Jill
But an even more iconic moment of embarrassing dialogue in the Resident Evil series would have to go to Barry and Jill in the original 1996 game. The writing and voice acting certainly weren’t the most remarkable aspects of the first installment, and the “Jill sandwich” interaction certainly proves that point.
Barry comes to Jill Valentine’s rescue as she’s trapped in a room with the ceiling collapsing in on her, kicking open the door and helping her escape before she can turn into a “Jill sandwich,” as he puts it. Jill literally responds by saying “You’re right,” and proceeds to question what Barry was doing there anyway when he said he’d be “going back to the dining room to do some research.” A conversation that sounds like it’s straight out of a bad ’80s film.
3 Skull And Bones
The Lack Of Any True Ship-Boarding Gameplay
Skull and Bones spent over a decade in development and was meant to be the immersive pirate sim successor to Black Flag. However, it ultimately launched as a much worse product, riddled with a ton of bugs. What made it even more embarrassing is that Ubisoft marketed Skull and Bones as their biggest crowning achievement to date, a “Quadruple-A” release.
-1.jpg)
Related
The Best Games That Let You Play As A Pirate
Pirates are always going to hold a special place in gaming mythology – and these are the best of the best.
In reality, Assassin’s Creed 4, which launched in 2013, has much better gameplay systems and graphics. The ship boarding in AC4 allowed you to actually board the enemy galleon and defeat its crew while fighting alongside yours. In Skull and Bones, the enemy loot appears right away in a menu graphic once the enemy ship is at low enough health, with no boarding like in AC4, and your crew gathering the loot is merely an animation that plays in the background.
All Assassin’s Creed games that followed Black Flag continued to feature naval combat that allowed ship-boarding, despite not being focused on a pirate story. And even 2025’s Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii has the option ‘To Deck Battle,’ which sees Majima fight waves of enemies aboard their weakened ship.
2 The Alters
Using Generative AI For Placeholder Text And Translations And Not Disclosing Its Use Up-Front
The Alters is a sci-fi game that received high praise from critics and players alike. At TheGamer, our reviewer Sam Hallahan even gave it five out of five stars. Though I don’t think the overall score would change, it is pretty disappointing that the game’s developer used AI and then tried to hide it, yet still failed miserably at concealing it to the point where many caught on and forced a statement to address it.
11 bit studios, the reputable company behind titles like Frostpunk, This War of Mine, Indika, and The Thaumaturge, confirmed it used generative AI for placeholder background text that it “mistakenly left in the game” before launch. It then also admitted to using AI to translate licensed movies you can watch in-game “due to extreme time constraints,” and planned to use the translation team only post-launch for a hot fix. Pretty shameful and embarrassing.
1 Mindseye
Your Character Walking On Water Due To Zero Water Physics
If you thought Cyberpunk 2077 had one of the worst launches in video game history, Mindseye said ‘hold my beer’ in 2025. While its futuristic premise might sound really cool and the main selling points were the return of Lincoln’s voice actor from Mafia 3, Alex Hernandez, as the main protagonist, Jacob Diaz, as well as Rockstar Games’ Leslie Benzies being the gmae director, the enemy AI is abysmal, and there are bugs galore.
This is already embarrassing enough for the game, but making matters even worse is the discovery that there’s no actual water physics, and therefore no swim animations. The water appears to have motion effects, though it’s basically treated like the rest of the surrounding ground, with you being able to run and walk on it. Your character running across Mindseye’s water is hilariously reminiscent of being stuck in an Assassin’s Creed loading screen.
Next
That Time I Was Reincarnated As A Game Title Souls: Origins – The Worst Game Titles Ever
Some of these video game names are just plain uninteresting or laughably bad, but we still love them for it.
