10 Cringeworthy Video Game Scenes That Made You Feel Dirty

Video games are good at many different things; they can inspire fear, make you happy, generate pure anger and even in some cases they can reduce a player to floods of tears. They have the power to create conversation, divide opinion and spark some pretty intense debates. As a form of entertainment, games have the power to tap into almost every human emotion and if they’re done well they can prove to be more memorable than any film, book or album.

However, one thing games have always struggled with is their portrayal of sex and sexuality. Even as they’ve become more realistic, video games have never been able to really capture that spark of desire between characters that can only really come with human performance. Worse than that, on the infrequent occasion when a game attempts to deal with sex or show it in any way, it can be pretty horrendous and sometimes downright worrying.
Over the years there’s been plenty of games that have tried (and failed) to show sexuality convincingly with results more often than not causing revulsion or fits of laughter rather than the desired arousal or emotion connection a sex scene can convey. Outside of those moments though, gaming is littered with little shots or sequences that, while most likely well humoured or intended to be entirely silly, come off as pretty wrong in almost everyone’s eyes. Here’s 10 of the worst offenders.
Friendly warning, most of the embedded videos in this article should be considered not safe for work. There’s spoilers aplenty too.

10. The Sex Scenes In Wolfenstein: The New Order

2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order was a tour de force showcase of exactly what the new generation of consoles could do. The game was a hyper-slick shooter with excellent mechanics, an insane alternate history story (Nazi’s win WW2, take over the world, possess huge robots, you know the drill) and some of the most satisfying shooting action this side of Call Of Duty. In this incarnation, B.J. Blaskowicz was reimagined as a slightly more complicated and emotional wall of walking muscle and unlike previous games in the franchise, was given a love interest in the Polish nurse, Anya.
Cue lingering looks, awkward dialogue sequences as B.J. internalises his emotions into monologues that Max Payne would cringe at, until about a third of the way into the game when Anya makes a move and the player is given what can only be the most unflattering sex scene ever written into a game. There’s something about B.J. and Anya’s cold dead stare into each other’s eyes that kinda takes the shine off, let alone the fact that they’re rutting on a table in an underground bunker. Where’s the romance these days?

9. Peeking On Meryl In Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid is, quite rightly, revered as one of the defining games of the original incarnation of the Playstation. It had everything, a huge and complex story, memorable boss fights, freedom in how you approached nearly every situation and a lead character with a voice so gravelly you’d think he gargled bricks every morning. Then there was Meryl, the strong, powerful heroine of the game who’s survival was dependent on how fast you could hammer the Circle button in one particular scene midway through the game.
When you first encounter Meryl, quite early on, she’s locked up in a holding cell doing what we would expect all mercenary soldiers to be doing, working out. You find her by climbing in a vent as you’re looking for the DARPA chief who is held in another cell. As you crawl through the vent, you spot her below you, just working out by herself, which in itself is innocent enough. However, if you meet a certain set of conditions, when you crawl through the vent she’ll be doing the exercises without her pants on, just in her underwear. What makes this creepy is that to trigger it, you really have to want to see it, because it involves climbing in and out of the vent a number of times to trigger the change.

8. Mass Effect’s Sex Scenes. All Of Them.

Bioware love to put humanity into their games, especially given that they make science fiction and fantasy epics where humans are usually in a minority. Ever since Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic they allowed players to generate romantic relationships with key NPCs all in the name of allowing the players to generate a story unique to them. This continued into the Mass Effect trilogy, where the irrepressible Commander Shepard was basically given free run of whichever human or alien babe he wanted to knock boots with. As the series went on it was even written in that same sex relationships could occur, should the player wish his or her particular Shepard to have their bread buttered that way.
In each of the three games there was a scene where the incongruous flirting would come to a head (usually just before the endgame started) and players would be treated to an all together awkward and slightly too graphic sex scene with their chosen beau. To be honest, rather than providing a satisfying end to a story arc, the scenes simply ask more questions, like why are they all so shiny? And are all alien females essentially humans with different heads?

7. The Awoken Cutscenes In Destiny

Okay, let’s get this straight, this isn’t a scene involving any nudity, sex or direct flirting, but it is incredibly awkward. About halfway through the main campaign in Destiny you are told to head to The Reef to speak to the Queen of the Awoken, who should know a thing or two about what you need to do next to save the solar system.
When you arrive at The Reef, you are frogmarched in front of the throne and treated to one of the most awkward scenes ever put into gaming. The Queen and her ward are brother and sister, but there is enough sexual tension, quasi-dominance and general weirdness to make any gamer uncomfortable. The Queen’s almost sultry presentation and display of power combined with the brother’s submissive pandering to her will after filling the player character full of bluster is possibly the strangest thing on this list and definitely raises some questions no one really wants to hear the answer to.