Anyone would feel a bit of panic while running along the edge of a building. So maybe it's her proximity to certain death that's causing her to move like a malfunctioning robot. But Faith looks even crazier during her casual strolls, like she's being controlled by a puppeteer trying to get fired.

Electronic Arts
"I AM walking a straight line! Maybe YOU'RE the wub that's intoxifated, occifer!"

The animators gave Faith's body all kinds of medically impossible twitches in order to make the game work. For instance, when she struggles across a tightrope-like pipe, the player sees this:

Electronic Arts
"Shitshitshitshitshitshit!"

Whoaa! She's barely able to stay on! Whoooaah!!! Well, when the camera zooms out, it's a little less dramatic. Her legs are perfectly locked onto the beam the entire time. But her upper body has the consistency of a fresh-baked cookie being slowly, delicately ripped apart by a hand model.

Electronic Arts
She's got that fresh-from-the-oven torso.

Faith's most hilarious performances come during quick time events -- those times you stop playing the game and instead must quickly identify shapes. It sounds too fucking stupid to be true, but it's a real device that video game developers love, for reasons known only to them and the mad god they worship. During its QTEs, Mirror's Edge knows you can't move your body, so it doesn't bother to animate it. Instead, it puts you in your default pose -- halfway through the "Y" motion from "YMCA" -- and magically floats you to your destination. For instance, if you're too slow pushing the triangle button on your controller, a bodyguard may choke-slam Faith off of a building to her death. In first-person, this is terrifying. But when you pull the camera back:

Electronic Arts
In all seriousness, 30 mannequins are killed every day by interpretive dancers. #SaveOurFallingMannequins

It seems like pure laziness to stretch a machine gun like a balloon animal and call it a day, but it's possible that Joanna's boss put this there intentionally. After all, a windmill that's secretly a 40-foot Gatling gun may be the sweetest spy gadget ever. James Bond's spike umbrella wishes it was a machine gun windmill.

In order to get the perspective of the game to look right, Henry had to become something that wasn't quite human. He looks like something that would steal Bavarian children in the 17th Century. And it gets weirder. Sometimes, Henry's goddamn head would fall off.

Panic Inc.
When you see this, it means his screams are coming from somewhere else.

When you access your backpack in Firewatch, there's a seamless animation as Henry grabs the straps. It all looks very normal in first person. But if you were to step back and watch yourself, you'd see your arms unhinge themselves as your hands inflate like blowfish. Everything about Henry is like a detail God would include in a story about how drunk he got last night.

Panic Inc.
"Haha, I was so hammered that I lost his head and glued his arms together from inflatable life rafts! Hahaha! And then I aimed a tornado at a gay marriage and hit a school! I ... I ... I think I have a problem, guys." -- God

In a way, all these bizarre programming tricks only make Henry more relatable. We've all left the house feeling cool, only to find that the outside world views us as a blowfish-handed, headless dwarf.

The Fallout franchise has had to use some unusual methods to get their world to work inside the game engine. For instance, the ending to New Vegas isn't a regular cutscene. When you beat it, you are in fact paralyzed in a room, staring at a slide show on the wall while Ron Perlman stands next to you talking in your ear.

But that seems almost sane compared to the way the developers got the trains in Fallout 3 to work. During one mission, you ride in the president's personal underground rail car. But the game's engine was not designed for vehicles. It was designed for lots and lots of running. The programmers said to hell with coding and testing an entire vehicle feature for one little mission, so they solved it the same way all great problems are solved -- they glued a train to someone's head and had them sprint down a tunnel. Seriously. While Fallout 3 players casually rode to their destination, this is what it looked like under their neck:

Bethesda
No wait, this is a still from David Lynch's Thomas The Tank Engine reboot.

This is fucking dada art. It is beautifully strange, strangely beautiful, and kind of extremely stupid all at once. The developers were faced with this huge problem, and someone actually suggested making clothes out of a train during a brainstorming meeting. Then someone else said, "The schizophrenic holding us hostage at knifepoint may be onto something!" It's not only a perfect solution to their problem, it's almost certainly the future of all travel.

Bethesda
Their constant pleading for death is troubling, but these trains get great gas mileage.

Technically speaking, the train is a glove, and gets equipped like any other piece of armor. If you zoom in closer, you can see the model is missing its right hand. That's because its arm is now a giant train car draped over its head. It seems hard to believe that it's easier to turn a glove into a train than it is to turn nothing into a train.

Perhaps, if we delve deeper, the entire game is gloves. Maybe Bethesda hired a 3D glove artist so talented that they didn't bat an eye when told that they needed one glove that's a presidential train and another that's a fully functional Pittsburgh quarry filled with radioactive mutants.

Witcher 3 was Skyrim on a Polish budget, and some argue that was for the best. For instance, it has far superior combat, a more cinematic presentation, an entire second card game (Gwent) within the main game, and did not allow you to burn hours of your life tricking physics into putting buckets on people's heads.

It also looks pretty amazing:

CD Projekt
This is what the game looks like, in case you spent all your time at the bar playing Gwent.

Of course, to make an open-ended game on a shoestring budget, the developers had to cut some big corners. They dedicated most of the processing power to simply displaying what is on your screen, like the polygons of the spearman Geralt is killing, or the spearwoman he is entering.

But if you unlock the camera and go spy on the world beyond Geralt's sightline, you find that the entire thing freezes, waiting for Geralt's precious attention to fall on it so that it might live again. And for some reason, when the NPCs stop moving, their faces use it as an opportunity to escape.

CD Projekt
She's a total butterface. Like, literally.

In what was almost certainly a desperate effort to save memory, the game stops running the code that keeps faces attached, and they ooze off the character's skulls. Each NPC also seems to have his or her own eerie state of rest. Arms fall off, heads rotate, and some find themselves paralyzed, silently screaming as their farm tools come to life. It is a demonic window into something we were not meant to see. If, during your prying, one of these abominations reached out of the screen and shrieked "INTRUDER!" it wouldn't even surprise you.

CD Projekt
"You are not the Witcher! What you witness is forbidden!"

A lot of the townspeople freeze, but the more animated characters have special trouble keeping it together. For instance, this hooker does a little sexy dance when Geralt is near. But when she tries it away from all that processing power, she looks like she's being ripped apart by a black hole.

CD Projekt
"Five dollars, no mouth stuff. For 10, I shriek how you will die from each corner of the chronosphere."

This poor woman seems to be having a triple-threat wrestling match between her face, clothes, and the laws that govern reality:

CD Projekt
"Kiiiillll ... MEEEEEEE."

If an NPC is extremely unlucky, they might lose heads entirely. Check out this woman cursed to shimmy endlessly until the game's main character gets close enough to give her face back:

CD Projekt
Try not to fall in love.

They each seem to be trying to live some kind of life, but in a world with no rules. For instance, this head decided to separate itself from its body. But in an unexpected twist, the body kept the hat in the divorce.

CD Projekt
Medieval Hats Quarterly says that shoulders are the new head.

Like in real life, everyone in this world is an uncooked chicken monster who only snaps back to human form when you look directly at them. What? Is that not what you all secretly believe, too?

CD Projekt
Here, the moment you stop looking, a man goes full Beetlejuice while his wife becomes a pig vagina. As we have always expected.

This fleshy, Cronenbergian horror world was the result of an ingenious way to stretch game resources, but it's also not a bad backstory. What if this is all a brilliant setup for a DLC in which it turns out that the entire population of the Northern Kingdoms were pig vaginas all along? That would blow your mind so hard that you could join the cast of the game.

For more nightmare fuel in video games, check out 8 Creepy Video Game Urban Legends (That Happen To Be True) and 6 Video Game Glitches Scarier Than Anything Done On Purpose.

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