Wild hidden mechanics in your favorite games

Video games are built around them mechanics. These can be anything from how you move through the world to how battles play out to how you interact with a trash can. Mechanics are the basic rules by which the game works and by which you interact with the world. They determine what you can do and what it means when you do something.

While most games lay out their mechanics gradually (usually in a tutorial) so you know what you're working with, sometimes games will hide their mechanics. There are many reasons for doing this, from enhanced immersion at the expense of realism to encouraging a certain playstyle without “forcing” it outright. The following games are all very popular, but for these reasons and many more, they have hidden mechanics operating in the background that will confuse you.

Time signatures correspond to the level you play (Thumper)

A musically inclined method of increasing difficulty

Dumper is a very interesting rhythm game that is less about hitting specific notes and more about making movements in time with the beat of a song. It's a lot like Metal: Hellsinger or even Hi-Fi Rush in that way. You control a beetle-like spaceship on rails, grind along the side of a track and avoid obstacles to the beat, and even fight bosses to close out each level.

All music theorists know that time signatures are fundamental to a musical composition; the higher the time signature, the more complex the song. In the case of dump trucks, which directly applies to each of the game's levels. For example, levels 1 and 2 are in 2/4 time (or 1/2 for level 1), level 3 is in 3/4 time, level 4 is in 4/4 time, and so on. It's a pretty clever way to gradually increase the difficulty of the game by tying that difficulty to the songs in each level.

Fewer enemies spawn when traveling in a straight line (Suikoden)

Makes it easier to move between destinations

One of the most frustrating aspects of older JRPGs is random enemy encounters. They usually appear as you explore. Without warning, you will find yourself in combat with a random selection of enemies from the local region. These encounters can make exploring difficult, especially if you're not grinding and just trying to reach your next objective. The genre tried a few different ways to mitigate this: Chrono Trigger made enemies visible, while Pokémon gave players the ability to escape from encounters. The Sui Code took a more nuanced approach.

When traveling across the world map in a straight line, such as from one city to the next or when heading towards a specific location, you'll encounter fewer enemies, speeding up your travel time by removing the stop-start of random encounters. Meanwhile, if you travel more aimlessly, like when you're exploring or when you're trying to grind for XP, more enemies will spawn, meaning that grinding will be easier when you're actually trying to grind. It's a really good way to balance both aspects of the game to keep things moving forward.

The Xenomorph Has Two Separate Brains (Alien: Isolation)

The method behind the monster

Speaking of famous enemy AI, Alien: Isolation's Xenomorph's enemy are widely considered to have some of the most detailed AI in gaming history. You play as Amanda Ripley (Ellen Ripley's daughter) as she explores the Sevastopol station while searching for her mother. While there are human and android enemies to contend with, by far the biggest threat is the alien itself. It will hunt you, learn your tendencies and adapt its strategy accordingly. If you hide in cupboards or under beds too many times, the Xenomorph will find you easily.

Alien: Isolation improves on that by giving the Xenomorph two separate “brains” that drive its AI: one moves the creature around the level, finding paths through vents and away from areas it's already searched, and the other learns and gives hints to the first brain about where to go. This second brain picks up on your behavior and tells the alien where to look for you, where you like to hide, and any patterns you follow when exploring (or escaping). What's most impressive is how these two minds work together to create a cohesive whole that not only feels like a thinking enemy but often feels smarter than you are.

Enemies target isolated players (Left 4 Dead)

Stay with the group

Left 4 Dead is a team-based game. Sure, you can play it solo with three other AI allies, but at the end of the day, you have to work together with the other survivors. These massive waves of zombies are far too relentless to handle on your own, and even the most skilled players will eventually be overwhelmed by the hordes of undead that descend upon them.

The thing is, then Left 4 Dead can also be played in co-op, there's no guarantee that all four players will live up to that expectation, so the game does some background tricks to force you into teamwork. While zombies may seem mindless, they still have AI, and that AI will single out players who are running on their own. In other words, if you wander away from your teammates, you'll be targeted instead of them. The same goes for players who don't have as many enemies as the others. Basically, if you don't actively help your team, the zombies will come after you first.

Enemies cannot turn 180 degrees (Batman: Arkham Asylum)

They will never see you coming

Batman: Arkham Asylum gets most aspects of Batman right: the combat, the investigative instincts and, of course, the stealth. This is the game that paved the way for the meme “It makes you feeling like Batman,” and there's a reason for that. This Batman is a crime-fighting menace. He deliberately walks into Arkham Asylum during a wholesale prison break and takes down each supervillain threat one by one. It's the kind of thing Batman is known for, but to achieve that level of authenticity, the game takes some shortcuts.

While hidden loading screens are a big part of it, another way enemies deal with Batman is while he's in stealth. The main thing is that they never look behind them unless they are afraid. They'll turn 90 degrees one way or the other, but never all the way around, giving you all the opportunity you need to sneak up behind them while making sure they never look like they're just standing still. But once they enter the “frightened” state, they can turn all the way around and perk up when their mates get picked on. This means encounters get harder as you progress, which is exactly how they should feel.

The end of your health bar lasts longer (DOOM)

It always feels like you just barely made it out alive

Fire extinguishing in DOWNFALL are intentionally hectic, and that plays into the boomer shooter style that id Software is going for. Abominable demons are everywhere, playing in front and behind you, and your best chance of survival is to keep moving. There is no hiding behind cover here; constant speed and gunfire is the recipe for success.

That being said, have you ever found yourself often completing an encounter with only a tiny bit of your health left? It doesn't happen all the time, but it is a surprisingly frequent occurrence. The reason for that is that the last bit of your health bar is actually worth a lot more health than it appears to be. This helps give the impression that you narrowly escaped a fight by the skin of your teeth. Assassin's Creed uses a similar mechanic, where the final notch in your health bar is much more robust without showing it as such. It's a sneaky little way for these games to make you feel like a total badass.

Machines evolve if you kill a lot of them (Horizon Zero Dawn)

Just like an AI would

Enemies of the machine in Horizon Zero Dawn available in all shapes and sizes. There are tiny Stalkers and Grazers, stealthy Stalkers and Snapmaws, and massive Thunderjaws, all of whom want to turn Aloy into red dirt in the post-post-apocalyptic wilderness. Her only option is to fight back, and she does, but with each machine she takes down, the AI ​​behind them gets stronger.

It's not just a lore thing either; these machines really evolve the more times you kill them. For smaller machines like Chargers, you'll need to kill a dozen or more before their behavior changes, but for larger enemies like Stormbirds, killing one is all it takes. This development mainly takes the form of increased armor, especially on the weak points of the machines. It also only applies to machines that are still made in cauldrons, so older machines like Corruptors don't evolve. It's a pretty cool detail that both improves the game Horizon Zero Dawn while at the same time tying themselves into the machines themselves.

You can use enemies as a human shield (Hotline Miami)

It's very specific and not very useful, but it can be done

Hotline Miami is a violent game. The actual context surrounding that violence is not so clear. It all feels like a mid-80s fever dream, where mysterious packages are delivered to you and tell you to go kill a bunch of people, and you do, usually with a baseball bat or a series of firearms. Enemies go down in one hit, but so do you, so the game's isometric levels often feel more like a puzzle than an arena of bloodshed, as you plot your course through the army of gun-toting thugs standing in your way.

Most of the time, when you come across a gun, it will be a two-handed rifle or a shotgun. These are both extremely effective, so don't miss them. But if you end up with a gun, Hotline Miami has a hidden mechanic that you can use in very specific circumstances. If you're using a handgun and you take down an enemy (say by hitting them with a door), instead of doing a standard execution on them, you'll pick them up and use them as a human shield. It's not that useful – it basically just absorbs a bullet, and it's more likely to follow right behind it – but it's a very cool hidden detail that you can easily play through the entire game and never see.