Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Difference between revisions

* Most [[MMORPG|MMORPGs]] will make use of this, applied to NPCs. Just [[Shoplift and Die|threw a rock at a merchant]] and are now fleeing the entire, bizarrely powerful legion of town guards? Simply cross the magical loading-screen border between the ''Town of Generica'' and the ''Generican Prarie'' immediately bordering it on the right, and not only will you lose every last pursuer; they'll cease to exist in your reality.

* ''[[Star Trek Online]]'' has one prominent example. On the Starfleet Academy map you are not able to access the waterfront which is only seperated by literal waist-height fence. Under normal circumstances your character would even be able to jump over it. However, when the area was first released there was a bug that transported you on the other side of the fence and let you explore the area beyond it - including the Golden Gate Bridge and the normally inaccessible shuttlebay atop one of the Academy's buildings.

* ''[[Eternal Darkness]]'' has a couple of puzzles where the door can only be opened by solving two puzzles. However, solving the first opens the door to just under head height, making the completely land based characters seem even more stupid. Its easy to justify with the fat characters and [[Squishy Wizard|squishy priest]], but the more physically active characters have no excuse.

** Also justified by the doors of impassibility in that either the characters don't ''want'' to leave or are physically incapable of manipulating the door or getting to the exit.

** They also have very liberal use of the ''Unclearable Debris'' type, although since you spend half your time in crumbling temples, its a bit more justified.

* ''[[Phantasy Star Universe]]'' has waist high fences in lobby areas regularly. What makes them so evil? Unlike most insurmountable waist high fences, where there is a way around, or nothing on the other side of interest, these fences REALLY DO have content on the other side that you can't get to. SEGA unlocks content, which already exists and was installed with the game, over time, letting them profit on your monthly fees; so you pay money for a few months in the hopes they'll yank down that fence. It's just cruel.

** In a less evil sense, there are the laser fences on the field. Which are about waist waist high, and often positioned in a way where, even if your characters forget how they were jumping around like lunatics during their photon arts, may still be easily bypassed by either climbing over the control panel used to open them, or in some cases, just stepping around it onto a slightly higher part of the staircase than you'd normally use.

** ''Black'' almost has more invisible walls and insurmountable fences than plot. Every mission is filled with situations like the one described above. In one mission you descend a staircase, only to notice that the last step is missing when you get down to the floor below. This missing step, only about 10 centimeters high, makes it impossible to go back the way you entered. The fact that you can't jump in the game only makes these situations more ridiculous.

** ''Black'' takes the silliness to further extremes. Many of the waist-high fences can literally be destroyed (by you or the bad guys)... but passing over them is still impossible. And the enemies can jump over whatever the heck they want.

** The sequel goes even further with this concept, as heavily damaged structures can collapse completely, killing anyone inside. Often this is a quicker way to destroy a key objective without having to arm and defend a bomb.

** Although on the singleplayer level "High Value Target" there is a part where all of the two-story houses have random bathtubs blocking the stairways, preventing you from going to the second floor. Even if you destroy the houses, the normally climbable rubble becomes this trope.

** Finally, in the third game, Hell's Highway, vaulting over obstacles was implemented. There's also a lot of destructible cover and terrain. Nothing beats blowing an MG out of his nest with a bazooka. The only things you can't go through are buildings - pretty much everything else is vaultable.

* [[Shadow of the Colossus]] averts this trope brutally, but has some instances where it's played straight. Wander can climb mountain-high monsters and still be unable to scale a few mountains in the valley with relatively gentle slopes.

**** Worse than the accursed rock in Qufim Island, there is the tiny, almost unnoticeable ledge by the final Notorious Monster tower in Dynamis - Xarcabard that while being only two or three ilms (in game term for an inch) high, far smaller than any character's stride, somehow it is as insurmountable as it it were the tallest cliff face.

** Inverted for NPC enemies, which can actually walk up VERTICAL CLIFF FACES to reach your player.

** In the 5th year of ''[[Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles]]'', the Jegon River is dried up, so the boat can't ferry you across it. However, it becomes so narrow that you should be able to easily jump it or even ''wade through it.'' Instead, you have to go all the way north to Veo Lu Sluice and revive the flowers that provide the river with water.

** The Besaid coast in ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'', in which a magical invisible wall is apparently present ''in the ocean''. Especially grim since the mini-map goes significantly beyond this point.

* Each ''[[Star Wars]]'' game in which the player can use a lightsaber. In the movies and various other media, these have been used to cut through several-inch-thick [[Unobtainium|Unobtainium-steel]] doors. In the games, they typically have no effect on any barriers whatsoever. ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]] 2'' actually allowed you to bash open doors with your lightsaber, but there were still "magnetically sealed" doors that resisted all force.

* In ''Uru: Ages Beyond [[Myst]]'', the player can climb or jump -- but cannot climb or jump over fences eighteen inches high, barbed wire lying flat on the ground, or the game's ubiquitous traffic barricades. (But at one point, his path is blocked by a simple wooden gate. {{spoiler|Jumping against it will knock it down.}})

** At least Uru allows your character to swim (and makes up for it in one area by introducing currents so strong you can't fight them). Myst and Riven are fond of blocking the player from interesting areas using water of various depths.

** An even stupider combination of this and [[Broken Bridge]] appears in ''Xenogears''. A small child accidentally leaves her stuffed animal in front of the door to the bridge of your sandship. This makes it completely impossible to enter the bridge until you find her and get her to move it. Even worse, the characters ''immediately declare this to each other.''

*** Even worse is the Tower of Babel. A large, tall, ''completely hollow'' tower that your characters have to ascend in their Gears, which, of course, are capable of ''flight''...and yet they make the entire ascent ''on foot''. It is official: the cast of ''Xenogears'' is [[Too Dumb to Live]].

* The two ''[[Red Faction]]'' games not only made strides to avert this trope by making much of the environment destroyable, but also sometimes required brute-force breaching to progress with the game. This feature, however, caused those points in the game that were obstructed by indestructible architecture (i.e. most of the game) to become only that much more conspicuous.

** Ironically, the third Red Faction game, with its enhanced ability to destroy anything waist-sized and up, and jetpacks and sprinting that allows the player to reach just about anywhere, there are several [[Ledges Of Instant Death]] and [[Invisible Walls]], usually at the bounds of the map. The player can find even greater heights to jump from without fatality, or even sometimes without major injury, and still die when jumping off map-edge ledges, while the little posts with bleeping lights on them tell you that the dastardly EDF have erected an invisible wall in the middle of this empty field.

** This room, as well as every other similar room in the game, is used to allow the game time to load the next area; using a Gameshark to hover over the grass, then walk through the tunnel on the other side, results in you seeing an area of nothing but sky, then the game freezing.

* In the game ''[[Koudelka]]'', the titular character [[Justified Trope|justifies]] her unwillingness to go over a relatively short fence due to her modesty, one of the very few instances where this phenomenon is addressed in a way consistent with the setting and explained plausibly. Still, you'd think somebody so concerned about modesty wouldn't have [[Stripperiffic|dressed like that]] to begin with...

** This also comes up in the boss fight against the giant Arcadebot, {{spoiler|which requires players to shoot themselves out of a cannon to reach the robot's weak point, rather than simply flying up there.}}

* In one level of ''[[Tomb Raider]]: Anniversary'', you come across several cages. With vertical and ''horizontal'' bars, which look like they could be climbed like a ladder. Which you nevertheless cannot climb, for a game which features all sorts of climbing (and actual ladders) in other situations...

** The series as a whole frequently uses frictionless hills, indestructible fallen logs/doors, uncrossable water/quicksand, and impassable foliage.

* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls]] IV: Oblivion'' it is possible, through the use of multiply stacked buffs, to attain superhuman "Acrobatics" skill levels, at which point the use of [[Invisible Wall|Invisible Walls]] by the game designers becomes apparent, e.g. when the player cannot cross some pieces of rubble, despite obviously clearing them by a huge margin. On the other hand, even an unmodified Acrobatics skill, in the upper ranges of what is normally attainable, enables the player to reach the roof tops in several of the cities, and from there the city walls and thus the outside of the city - which should have been kept inaccessible, since this reveals that outside world is only an empty, low-resolution copy of the proper game world, which one reaches by exiting through the gates. In the expansion pack ''Shivering Isles'' some of the guardians patrolling the landscape are stymied by a combination of ankle deep water - which they refused to cross - and a slope that was ''just'' too steep to be climbed at their normal walking speed, so that they ended up treading in place for minutes on end.

* In ''[[Nehrim]]'' (a game based on total conversion of Oblivion), not only the transparent walls are quite prevalent, the authors were quite fond of using "Ledge of Instant Death", sometimes becoming a "Gentle Slope of Instant Death" of "Flat Path of Instant Death". (after the initial cave, as the only path transfers from ledge to ravine, you can turn right crossing through some knee-high bushes (without even jumping), walk towards the waterfall and die for no visible reason at all.)

** Although since Cave Story is a 2D game, it probably has something to do with the fact that no matter how he tries your poor little protagonist can't actually point his missile launcher at the door.

** Later in the game, the entrance to the waterways is initially blocked by a grate which can't be opened even with an [[NPC]]'s help. If it could, a difficult [[Boss Battle]] and a major plot twist could have been avoided.

*** Kingy does this if you try to go anywhere but the row of three map tiles between Windfall and Dragonroost Island, and the column from Dragonroost to Tree Haven before you clear the dungeon on Tree Haven. So if you want to get back to Windfall Island from Tree Haven, you have to go north and then west, rather than just cutting through diagonally...

* In the ''[[Resident Evil]]'' game series the protagonists, even though they are either well trained members of the Raccoon City Police's special task-force S.T.A.R.S. and/or are able to perform insane stunts like jumping down stairs while fetching a gun in mid-air and shoot gas tanks to take out an entire team of evil grunts one-handed, are overstrained when facing old, battered wooden (read: adamantium) doors they don't have the right key for. This trope becomes especially comical if the player is circled by a pack of zombies who will tear him apart any second and his only escape route would be through an old rusty garden gate, but he'd rather stop any attempts of escaping saying to himself "It's locked. I don't have the right key to open it". Further, in numerous cut-scenes the protagonists find themselves in exactly the same situation, but will then suddenly remember their training back at the police academy and simply breach the door which leads to their escape route.

** This gets even more ridiculous in the first Resident Evil game, where Jill Valentine, ex-Delta Force and current S.T.A.R.S member, complete with pistols, machine guns, and even rocket launchers, is equipped with a lock-pick and has been dubbed "The Master of Unlocking", still cannot go through the very same wooden doors. It gets even more absurd when a cut-scene in the game which shows Jill trapped in a locked room, ie the "Jill Sandwich" [[Descending Ceiling]] room, being rescued by another member who promptly just shoots the lock off the door to rescue her.

** Not to mention the doors that require ''obscure objects'' to open them. Why would the protagonists go searching for a blue jewel or a silver crest, when they can just kick the door down instead?

** ''[[Resident Evil]] 4'' however, with its redefined control scheme, makes it easy to just [[Action Commands|hit the Action button]] to jump over any sufficiently low fence when prompted. Of course, this only serves to make the game's proper insurmountable waist height fences more jarring when you have to perform an irritating [[Fetch Quest]] for a gate key instead of just jumping over the gate. On the plus side, a lot of non-plot-critical locked doors can be kicked down or blown open with a weapon, so it's a small step in the right direction.

** In ''[[Resident Evil]] 5'', there's a [[Light and Mirrors Puzzle]] wherein the light ''kills'' you, and you have to figure out a way to point it where you want without blocking yourself in, ignoring the fact that you could easily get on the ground and crawl under the light.

** There's the scene where you have to wander around on a moving conveyor belt leading to an incinerator and littered with half-dead zombies, in order to get round a metal crate ''that barely comes up to shoulder height'' on the protagonist, who is strong enough to {{spoiler|move a boulder several times his size by punching it}}, but apparently can't lift his own body weight a few feet. To make it worse, the only thing preventing the heroes from going around the box is a ''handrail.''

** Or how about even earlier, in Goomba Village? Kammy taunts Mario, and drops a Yellow Block on the gate out. Even though Mario can easily jump higher than the nose-high fencing, he can't actually jump over. Same with the fence at the bottom of the cliff the Goomba house is built on: it, too, is blocked with a Yellow Block, and you can't jump the fence. But in both cases, this is a good thing, as if the game didn't force you to get the Hammer, you'd be stopped by later obstacles and unable to harm some of even the earliest enemies, but still, it's a good thing the Hammer didn't fall on the ''other'' side of the fence, or Mario would be stuck...forever.

* Happens a lot in ''[[Drakengard]]'', especially in any scenes involving ruins or recently-destroyed buildings.

** The SNES Mode 7 hardware is incapable of rendering true 3D, making this an [[Acceptable Break From Reality]].

** Averted on the SNES retro maps that appear in ''Mario Kart DS'', as all barriers from those levels are changed to cubes from squares.

* In ''[[Terranigma]]'', you can jump. Sometimes you can jump over gaps. Other times, you run into an invisible wall. Sometimes you can jump down deep holes in the ground. Other times, you just take damage and are put back where you fell from. Still other times, you hit invisible walls. [[Try Everything|The only way to find out is to try]].

* ''[[Sid Meiers Pirates]]'' uses a literal [[Insurmountable Waist High Fence]], to the player's advantage. During the stealth segments of the game, the player can leap over a fence to avoid guards, who, despite being able to see you clearly on the other side, are too fat and lazy to climb over and arrest you.

* ''[[Gran Turismo]] IV'' has particularly strong plastic fences. On the Grand Canyon rally course, part of the course travels along the very edge of a cliff with only a foot-tall plastic home depot orange netting keeping a runaway car (or Truck) from careening off the edge. Somehow this flimsy-looking fencing handles the task incredibly well, even so far as bringing a full size Dodge Ram truck doing well over freeway speed to a dead stop.

** On some tracks in ''[[Gran Turismo]] 3'', you can glitch your way through the barrier. If you go too far out of bounds, the game freezes.

*** In 3, you can open a few doors. It's just that terrible things happen every time you do.

*** In multiplayer, hosting a dedicated server lets you, among other variables, set jump height much higher than in normal gameplay. This doesn't really let you go anywhere you couldn't normally get to, as pretty much every prop in the game even half as tall as a player character has an invisible wall around the top.

* Every ''[[Grand Theft Auto]]'' game until ''San Andreas'', along with the later PSP sequels, leading some reviewers to comment on their inferiority.

* ''[[College Saga]]'' parodies this (just like it parodies everything else). "A huge chair is blocking your path". Once Jesus joins your party, he averts the trope by simply blowing the chair up.

* ''[[Twisted Metal]] 2'' has a level set in a Dutch tulip field. The field is bordered by a small wooden fence which cannot be destroyed or jumped over, whereas the two sturdy windmills in the field go down easy.

** To be fair, the pebbles are supposed to be much bigger than that, and those that are slightly smaller are used to keep puzzles from being too simple, for example moving a log or something of the like.

* The MMORPG ''[[Ryzom]]'' is full of these, both of the waist high fence and invisible wall varieties. The invisible walls can be particularly aggravating, as anything steeper than a very gentle slope seems to have one.

* The hero in the maddening old Nintendo game ''[[Spelunker]]'' died if he fell into a pit that was half the size of his body.

* ''[[ZOMG]]'' features several Insurmountable Waist High Fences. The stairs out of the Train Station are chained off, forcing you to fight your way through the Sewers (Which also serves as the game's tutorial). Of course, the doors out of the station are locked too, and jumping the gate would mean missing out getting the rings you need to get any farther than Barton Town. Though when you can't step over a 2 inch ledge in the Zen Gardens, you start to suspect something...

* It's not waist-high, but the rubble/debris piles in ''[[Fallout]] 3'' are arranged in such a way that any normal person could climb over them. You, however can't.

** There are also innumerable Adamantium Doors, many of which appear to be made of wood... some even with large holes through which a normal person could just reach and unlock the other side. Aggravatingly, the trope is partially inverted in that you ''can'' force many doors with your bare hands... but you only get the option if you've got enough Lockpicking skill to open it anyway via the lockpicking [[Mini Game]]. The fact that you get nuclear weapons early in the game never enters into consideration.

** There's even an ''actual'' insurmountable waist high fence, in a backyard in Takoma Park. Never mind that the 200-year-old white picket fence is likely so flimsy it could be pushed over, you can't get past it even if you ''build yourself a ramp''. Stupid [[Invisible Wall]]...

** There are enough insurmountable gentle slopes in the game world that some players decided to take matters in their own hands, and [[Game Mod|modded them out]]. This makes the game considerably easier to [[Sequence Breaking|sequence break]], as with the mod installed the only thing preventing the player from reaching the top of the tallest mountains is a whole lot of hopping. There are also mods that make the lockpicking minigame an option if you happen to have explosives in your arsenal - but they still can't blast open doors not explicitly meant to be openable.

** There's even an ''Impassable Head High Hole'' in a hallway in the East Central Sewers by "Sweet" Jill's corpse. There's a ''knee-high pile of rubble'' in the way, that you can't climb over, because the ceiling is about 6 inches too low. [[Invisible Wall|You still can't climb over it even if you're crouching]]. Made worse by the fact that the giant sewer rats can get over it no problem.

** The earlier Fallout games play the trope much more directly. Because of how the game deals with shop inventories many of the merchants in the game have their items stashed in containers on the map just beyond the player's vision and, thanks to various waist-high obstacles, beyond their reach as well. At least one of these inventories in Fallout 2 can be accessed with patient skirting of a waist-high fence, not that it really breaks the game at all.

** See also Sigmateam's ''[[Alien Shooter]]'', an isometric shooter where the final weapon is some sort of [[BFG|shoulder-fired nuclear-powered gatling gun]]...which still cannot seem to destroy basic office equipment. Perhaps the aliens should have made their armour out of cheap Chinese plastic instead.

* ''[[Eternal Sonata]]'' features some insurmountable sticks on the ground, especially in [[Stealth Pun|Mt. Rock]]. Oddly enough, standing behind one of these sticks will cause an enemy on the other side of the stick to be seemingly unable to see you.

* In ''[[Condemned]]'' it's not uncommon for a tipped-over shelf to completely block a door, preventing Ethan Thomas from passing when he could have easily shoved it out of the way. In the sequel, it's made even more frustrating in that Ethan can now climb through windows, slip through gaps, climb boxes, and jump down pits, but only when demanded by the very linear level design. It makes it very frustrating to be in a hotel and see a luggage cart and reception desk blocking your path, requiring you to find the small, foot-wide area where you can press the magic button to slip through. Of course, Ethan can never do this in other circumstances, such as climbing over a few cardboard boxes and a couch instead of needing to use a conveniently-placed ramp. The worst part is that oftentimes players will struggle to find a context-sensitive area that allows them to progress, or spend time searching for an alternate route when Ethan can just climb through the hole. He can't even climb fences or gates that are locked behind the people he's pursuing, yet attacking enemies can vault over them no problem.

** Also, Ethan lacks the ability to jump (again, unless it's part of the level design). The issue? Physics objects, like garbage cans, can easily fall in the player's path, yet Ethan can't jump over them and will be stopped in his tracks by an ankle-high cardboard box, requiring the player to kick it out of the way.

* According to the Official Playstation Review of ''[[Killzone]] 2'', there's a particularly bad example. The player's squadmates can climb over a fence with no problem, but the [[Player Character]] needs their help to get over ''the exact same type of fence''.

** ''[[Crysis Warhead]]'' doesn't. While you can drive down trees with your Armoured Personnel Carrier and blow up whole buildings with nothing but a grenade, you will still get stuck (sometimes permanently) in the same flimsy wood fences that you could kick down even if you ''weren't'' a nano-suit augmented super soldier.

* Parodied in ''[[Leisure Suit Larry]]: Magna Cum Laude''. When Larry examines a road construction site, he says it's a cheap way to block off the player from wandering off the level.

** In SH 2, the above-ground path to the boat launch is blocked by a literal waist-height fence. To get around it, you must go through... the Abyss. And there's a [[Locked Door]] barring entrance to that.

*** Possibly justified in that you do not know that the boat launch is your destination. Your next goal is supposed to be inside the Historical Society building.

*** One truly bizarre example is when you stop at the ranger station in the woods. It shouldn't take less than 8 seconds to get out of the car, but in the time it took for you to pull up to the cabin and get out, a waist-high snowbank has formed over the back part of your car and in front of you, blocking you from driving either direction. Strangely, the snowbanks tend to be high, but formed in a way that Harry could scale them with a little climbing.

* ''[[Pikmin]] 2'' has short rocks in some of the caves. <s> Justified</s> But in this game, you can't jump.

** Fans of ''[[Thief]]'' 1 and 2 were unpleasantly surprised by Thief 3: Deadly Shadows turning bodies of water more than ankle-deep into deathtraps, surprising because in Thief 1/2, not only could master thief Garrett swim, it was ''required'' for several missions. Somehow Garrett '''forgot how to swim''' in his journey from Thief 1/2 to Thief 3.

** In ''[[Thief]]'' 3, once you acquire the climbing gloves you can climb brick or stone walls till your hearts content, unless there is a wooden beam thicker then four inches blocking your way.

* ''[[Need for Speed]]'' series: In most of the games, you hit an invisible barrier if you try to jump the fence, but in the later tracks of ''II'', there are spots where you can jump the barrier and fall into [[Bottomless Pits]].

** In ''[[Need for Speed]] Hot Pursuit'' (2010), some of the tracks have shortcuts blocked off by glowing force fields. While this could be hand waved as a gentleman's agreement amongst the racers, the police chasing them are similarly barred from using them for not good reason.

** The ''Cataclysm'' expansion averts and plays straight the trope. During development, the developers admitted that a lot of the geometry in the original [[World of Warcraft]] simply wasn't there, and they had to put unclimbable terrain in the way so players couldn't get there. With ''Cataclysm'', players can now fly in the original world, so Blizzard had to completely rebuild it from the ground up in such a way that the entire world was accessible via flight. However there are still unclimbable slopes if you are not riding a flying mount.

*** Of course, even with a flying mount, there are still a handful of invisible walls, like in the mountains north of the Plaguelands, which blocks players from entry for no specific reason.

** This is just an example of the series' quirky humor. It's parody if anything.

** Fences we can understand. Fences that a paper airplane cannot go over, not so much. Especially since the best places to launch the airplanes are always blocked by fences.

* In Spiderweb Software's ''[[Geneforge]]'' series of games, no matter how powerful your character gets, he is never able to break through/into relatively flimsy doors and cabinets. However, he is still able to pick the locks on such, using a combination of mechanical skills and [[Applied Phlebotinum|"living tools"]].

* Played so very straight in Robert Ludlum's "The Bourne Identity" where most every object is an impassable barrier despite the player being JASON BOURNE. At one point it got so bad that a stairway was blocked by a simple red rope barrier forcing the player to go all the way round.

* ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'' has one specific moment where this is gratingly apparent. The protagonist Solid Snake, a veteran special forces soldier, runs down the stairs in a tower for several floors, only to be thwarted when the bottom five feet of the stairs have collapsed. Any normal adult could easily drop down that height without injury. Rather than doing so, Snake opts to climb back to the top of the tower and fight a Hind-D while Otacon fixes up the elevator.

** In one level of the fourth game, choosing to back track into the building you just exited is physically impossible. Apparently, this one side of the building is capable of withstanding bullets, grenades, C4, missile launchers, and even rail gun fire.

* [[Lampshade Hanging]] in Privates, where the player is frequently informed that "We can't get past these little velvety ropes just yet."

** It also has a pretty wide spreading example in Bowser himself as a playable character, since he can't jump, half his adventuring has you try and figure out ways round very small ledges that Mario and Luigi themselves can simply jump right over.

** Actually, Bowser can jump when he gains the Shell Slam ability, but only straight up into the air, and several times higher than the ankle high ledges.

** Also, in the dessert planet Rosa, you have to get to some ancient ruins that are visible from the city's gates. And you are forced by [[Invisible Wall|invisible walls]] and [[Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence|unclimbable mounds of sand]] to take a complicated coiling road plagued with monsters instead of just ''freakin' running in a straight line towards the ruins.''

* ''[[Syphon Filter]]'': Grate blocking subway ramp? You can't use grenades on it, only C4 will take it down, from the other side. Hedge maze in Washington Park? No, you can't climb over the hedges. Cars blocking the road? Forget about climbing over them. And outside of cutscenes, falling more than about 10 feet kills you instantly (no falling damage in between).

* ''[[Jagged Alliance]] 2'' lets you vault over fences and climb any house that has a flat roof. But you can't climb over crates, tables and pretty much everything else that isn't either a fence or a flat topped building.

** This is more a coding issue than intentional blockage for the most part. Fan-mods fix this up some.

* ''[[Dragon Age]]'' pulled this one. Particularly [[Egregious]] in the Human Noble origin story, when your path was blocked by ''Insurmountable Ankle-Height Rubble''. Even "better", the collision detection with said rubble is off ''just'' enough that, when you try to cross it, your feet are coming down on top of the very obstacle that "impedes" your progress.

* [[Assassin's Creed]] justifies it somewhat with areas of the map blocked by blue mist rendered inaccessible until certain events have transpired: the player character is expressly trying to re-visit memories in a way similar to the original, so [[Sequence Breaking]] isn't allowed. It's even improved in Assassin's Creed 2, where it is physically possible to cross these barriers, but staying on the far side gets you "desynchronized" from the original sequence of events. However, it's played painfully straight with any and all doors in the games, which are never opened by the player character unless he's invited in. Apparently, the best and only way to defend yourself from the best assassins in imagined history is to simply stay behind closed doors. You don't even have to lock them. The need to assassinate one's targets only during specific events in which they are in the open and assassins' guild branches always having an open rooftop entrance may imply that the assassins are somewhat aware of this limitation.

* [[Black and White]] 2 creatures, despite being over one hundred feet tall when fully grown, cannot step over houses less than a quarter of their height.

* ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'' and its sequel feature a variety of these. There are a number of occasions where the survivors' path is blocked by apparently surmountable obstacles: the truck on the bridge after it is bombed in "The Cemetery" level of ''The Parish'' campaign and the short fence before the running panic event in "The Barns" level of ''Dark Carnival'', both in ''Left 4 Dead 2'', are outstanding examples. The survivors are also incapable of scaling drainpipes, columns and the like, despite the Infected (which are just humans with a mutant strain of rabies) being perfectly able to use them, and there are a large number of handle-less doors that are impervious to chainsaws, fireaxes, crowbars and explosions despite all of these objects being able to demolish and/or damage all the "usable" doors throughout the game. Also, when playing as the Infected in Versus mode, the limits of the player's range are often baldly indicated with a literal invisible wall, marked only with a string of floating "no entry" signs. The survivors' initial spawn point in a campaign is often surrounded by an invisible wall (as at the beginning of ''The Parish'', where the players are prevented from running off the side of the dock or off the short gangplank leading up to the waterfront).

* Almost every level in the ''[[STALKER]]'' games (at least, the first two). Most of the exterior levels are bordered by flimsy barbwire fences. You can jump over higher things during the game, including climbing a stack of crates over a concrete wall (twice in quick succession) during one of the plot missions in Clear Sky, but the border fences are unjumpable. They do jingle when you bump them, though...

** To be fair, beyond those little barbwire fences is a very quick and painful radiation death.

** Similarly, if you anchor or fly across the space behind the spawn point and land on the other side, there's an invisible wall which you can't move through but oddly enough, you can shoot through it.

*** Also, when the Ymir fruit drops off a tree. It's only a couple of feet away in some seemingly shallow water, one of the party characters ''has wings'', and you STILL have to go through a ridiculous animal-calling puzzle to push it to shore halfway across the map.

*** Also, when walking around as Arche (possible in later remakes), she seems to float around on her broom when "running." She still gets hurt by tiny floor spikes.

* The ''[[Medal of Honor]]'' series [[No Sidepaths No Exploration No Freedom|railroads the player]] with just about every type; standard insurmountable waist-height fences or walls, barbed wire, minefields, [[Invisible Wall|invisible walls]], indestructable fallen logs, impassable foliage, unclearable debris, adamantium doors, and unclimbable slopes. Even the more non-linear ''Airborne'' often uses these, and no, you can't parachute over them either. One of the most egregious examples is the insurmountable brick wall in the first mission. Subverted in the Sniper's Last Stand: Outskirts level of ''Allied Assault'', where you get to blow open a gate with a bazooka. The Nebelwerfer Hunt has an impassible window where you have to trick a Tiger tank into destroying the wall, as you can't blow it up with your own rocket launcher either.

** The sequel, however, fixed this, even offering an achievement/trophy for climbing on one of said fences.

* Happens in your favour in Lego Rock Band. Your band knocks down a narrow tree which stops a 40ft tall robotic T-Rex in its tracks.

* Probably the oldest case of this in video games is [[Zork]]. Yes, the waist high fence even existed before graphics to -see- it.

{{quote| '''You would need a machete to go further <whatever direction>.'''}}

* The second [[Star Trek Elite Force]] has a very annoying one of these moments, where the main character and his team are in a sewer system and he gets separated from them. Shortly thereafter, they find each other in the maze of tunnels only to be stopped from continuing on together by barrier resembling the bars on a jail cell. Only the bars are about two and a half feet or so apart. One team member even places a hand on each one and leans forward through the bars, only to say "We need to find a way to link up." As if the team or the leader simply couldn't step between the bars.

* In ''[[Donkey Kong Country]] 2'''s Krazy Kremland area, the heroes find themselves outside a [[Circus of Fear]]. They enter and pass through all obstacles, only to emerge in a swamp about twenty in-game feet from the entrance. Separating them is nothing but a grassy knoll.

* ''[[Minecraft]]'' allows players to ''build'' these in survival mode. However, it is also averted, if the player is standing on a block even half a block high and tries to jump, they will be able to get over the fence. This is because the fences act as being 1.5 blocks high when checking for collision, whiel only looking to be one block high. It is also somewhat literal, since the player characters are 2 blocks high.

* Justified in ''[[Disaster Report]]'' and ''[[Zettai Zetsumei Toshi|Raw Danger]]'', there tend to be police near police tape, and in the middle of disaster areas your characters are rightly afraid their weight will cause even bigger collapses, endangering those below or themselves. The fact one NPC is killed this way doesn't help confidence much. Also, much in the same way as older adventure-type games, [[FP Ses]], and [[PS 1]] survival horrors, the movable/destructible bits look obviously 'loose' or shaky or a different colour to draw attention to them. Also similar to those adventure games, the ones you can't currently pass that you need to will give you a vague hint as to why. "This looks like a two person job" or "The edges look sharp. I don't want to touch it with my bare hands."

* You can't climb anything that isn't a ladder in ''[[Dark Souls]]''.

* ''[[Xenoblade Chronicles]]'' has a ridiculous one where the characters must fabricate a bomb to blow a way through a grid blocking a corridor. That is, despite the main character ''having [[Absurdly Sharp Blade|a sword able to cut through anything]]''. And even without that, your other characters have [[BFS|BFSs]], [[BFG|BFGs]], [[Functional Magic]] and other crap that could do the job. Nope, you gotta make that bomb! Did a ''[[MacGyver]]'' fanboy write this part?

* In [[Orcs Must Die]], you can build insurmountable waist height barricades to channel the orcs.

* The western half of Peasantry in [[Homestar Runner|''Peasant's Quest'']].

 

* Guineafowl have demonstrated a remarkable inability to get around an ''open'' farm-gate. Sometimes it takes as long as 15 minutes for them to realise they can ''fly over it'', so actually managing to walk around it doesn't tend to occur.

* [[Dave Barry]] wrote about his dogs who waited in front of a door to be let outside, even though the door was the only part of the porch that was still standing after a hurricane. Thus, they could have simply walked ''around'' the door.

* Pronghorn antelopes are apparently unable or unwilling to jump over even short fences (quite different from deer or true antelopes)

** [[Not So Different]]. The gas and oil pipelines laid across the northen Russian plains became a serious problem for the migrating deer herds there. Although the animals should technically be able to get over them, they are too afraid of an unfamilliar obstacle.

 

== Film ==

** Note that he locks the gate by ''reaching over to their side and locking it.''

* Seen in ''[[Hot Shots Part Deux]]'', wherein the crack squad of commandoes are stymied by a backyard gate, which has been "locked from the inside."

== Video Games ==

* ''[[The Simpsons Game]]'' [[Lampshades]] this, as pointed out by Comic Book Guy as a Video Game Cliche.

 

 

== Webcomics ==

** Another one from the same comic features [http://adventurers.keenspot.com/d/0047.html a chair].

* Episode [http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2006-07-17 #172] of the webcomic ''[[Concerned]]'' made fun of this trope as it applies to the game ''[[Half Life]] 2''.

== [[Web Original]] ==

 

{{quote| '''Angry Joe:'''"It's no use! The bullets are just going through the ''hooooooooooles''!"}}

** Not even ''ladders'' can let them bypass the fence! {{spoiler|They have to use footstools instead.}}

* The short film ''[[College Saga]]'' [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPutYwiiE0o parodies] this (among many other video game tropes) by blocking the character's progress with a chair standing in the middle of the road.

* In a College Humor parody trailer for a [[Sims]] movie, a cop is standing on one side of a chest high, chainlink fence and literally calls in backup because, "There's no conceivable way to get past this fence!"

{{quote| '''Matt:''' I'm not super enough or soldier enough to go up these one foot tall sandbags! ''50 million dollars well spent!''}}

* Lampshaded in ''[[Freemans Mind]]'' on multiple occasions as Gordon complains about bullet-proof glass in exit doors, invulnerable doors, and the many other inconveniences he faces.

* Referenced in [[The Best Page in The Universe|Maddox's]] [http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=signs review of] ''[[Signs]]'':

{{quote| ''"I have hind legs powerful enough to jump up 10 feet onto roof tops, the technology to conquer the non-trivial challenge of intergalactic space travel, but I'll be DAMNED if I can kick down this wooden door."''}}

 

{{reflist}}