Even the most open video games have places we can’t explore, whether locked rooms or entire areas within past barriers. We wanna see literally everything games have to offer, but sometimes, we’re not supposed to or we think we’re not supposed to. But that’s the thing, it doesn’t matter. We’re gonna find it anyway.
Hi folks, it’s Zaid and today on Aura Riot, 10 locked areas in games we didn’t think we’d unlock.
10. Tiny Demons from DOOM: The Dark Ages
This game gives you a big dragon to ride around in. And in the first level with your new dragon friend, you’re free to complete objectives in a giant map, a very big sci-fi metropolis place. It’s so big we kinda just wanted to know, is it really to scale? You’ll land in each area in a seamless transition sequence, but is the city actually modeled?
Now there’s a way players have been able to explore more and it’s all thanks to a vault teleport glitch. By opening the map at a specific time while vaulting over obstacles, it’s possible to despawn the map and move the doom guy wherever you want. Speed runners have been using this trick to skip huge sections of the game, but I think there’s something better that we need to see. It’s the rest of the big sci-fi city.
Oh, by despawning the map and using this glitch, the doom guy can avoid the bottomless pit zone that surrounds your area and drop into the rest of the fully modeled city. What’s most interesting is that, I mean, it’s not just that the city isn’t as big as it looks, even if it is lower detail than the rest. It’s that the city’s populated with low poly monsters. All those demons you see fighting from a million miles away have AI and will attack you like normal when you enter their little zone. Their textures are all mushy. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t impressive. The giant city wasn’t faked. Even the fake looking demons are totally real here.
9. Jumping the Border in Cyberpunk 2077
A little wall isn’t gonna stop us in this game. Barriers of Night City cause your game to glitch out and turn your character V back around to where they started. But there’s one specific area you’re not allowed to cross. It’s actually very possible to sneak through.
At the massive border crossing area, if you try passing through traffic and leaving Night City without all of your passports in order, the guards just shoot you on sight. There’s no way to survive this normally, and there’s no real way to cross. So let’s get sneaky.
After unlocking the Fortified Ankles implant, you’ll gain a powerful charge jump that pushes your V to new heights. And one of those new heights is the top of the big border walls. Using a lonely tree at the right of the main road, V can bounce onto the spiky thing and then jump up to the barbed wire, jump again, and you’ll reach the top of the giant invisible wall and walk all the way to the other side of the checkpoint.
It counts as a hostile area, but nobody can see V sneaking around on the rooftop. Drop down to the other side, and we’ve got a whole futuristic world to explore on the other side. At least we can imagine one, there’s a vast, empty, expansive desert that becomes less and less detailed the further you explore, which makes sense. It wasn’t meant to be seen.
There’s also, I mean, a lot more stuff in Cyberpunk 2077 we weren’t supposed to see. There’s so many out of bounds areas full of cut content like abandoned apartment buildings and corners of the world that were never fully modeled. Night City is so huge, even after tons of improvements, the developers still haven’t really finished off every detail. We’re still finding secret nooks and crannies to look around in years after the original buggy release.
8. Vaulting the Gates in Kingdom Come II
One of the most guarded areas in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is completely blocked out of the main game. It’s basically one big piece of cut content in the corner of the map. In the second region of the game, you’ll explore a giant graveyard at a place called Skalitz Monastery, but the actual monastery is completely locked up. There’s no working doors to get inside. So we decided to make our own door.
By using the headstart, with a very fast horse, Henri can slam into the outer walls of the monastery until you vault right over the top. It’s one of the few areas that at one point didn’t have an invisible wall surrounding it so anyone could get inside with a whole lot of jumping.
Skalitz Monastery is an important part of the game story. It’s where the evil King Sigismund is staying while putting down the rebellion in the nearby city. A rebellion you are deeply embedded in. So it kinda makes sense you weren’t allowed anywhere near.
The monastery actually has a lot more detail than you’d think though. There’s ponds, a vineyard, small army camp of tents, interiors to explore. That’s a surefire sign this area was meant to be completed and just never was, which has been basically confirmed ’cause there’s a big DLC related to the monastery coming out eventually.
We love getting an early look at a location. It’s been clearly thought out with a very specific layout to each courtyard that was previously impossible to see. Now we’re just gonna have to wait to see how much the expansion matches the original.
7. Getting Stuck in the Back Rooms in MyHouse.wad
Cheating has never been punished more severely than in the meta weirdness of MyHouse.wad. This is a mod for the original extremely old Doom II. It became a viral sensation a few years back and it’s still stuck in everybody’s head here at Gameranx.
It’s this sort of weird experience that just feels important, even if it’s, I mean, it’s not really, it’s a mod, it’s a work of fiction. It’s made up, it’s fake, but the secrets just keep coming the further you explore.
It’s a seemingly simple recreation of someone’s childhood house in the Doom engine, packed with so many secrets. The developers put in a countermeasure for anybody trying to cheat and explore every aspect of the map without solving the puzzles first.
If you try using the ID CLIP cheat to no clip through the walls, you have fallen into the back rooms. Stuck inside the infinitely expanding spooky office building with yellow walls. I mean, there’s nothing to do there except explore. You’re stuck there forever.
But if you linger for too long, a dark presence appears in the distance. First, it floats in front of the player at a distance before reappearing right behind you and killing you instantly. It’s an awesome little event that we never saw coming, and it’s a locked area we didn’t really imagine unlocking until we stumbled right in the trap.
6. The Flipped World Trick in Mario Kart World
It’s not a locked location so much as there’s an entire locked world. One we didn’t expect to see either. If you’re a dedicated Mario Kart World player, you’re probably already, you know, through all the digging and have seen every corner of the giant free roam map. It’s totally new to the series.
But how about exploring a flipped version? It’s like looking into a bizarro world with all the text flipped and all the turns reversed. It doesn’t serve any purpose, but very few of these areas do anyway. It’s kinda about exploration for exploration’s sake.
To enter the mirror world, you have to unlock mirror mode by finishing every course and knockout tour at 150 CC speeds. You also need to find 10 of each type of collectible, which is a lot harder than it sounds in a game with a map that barely functions in a free roam mode with no stated goals or even a real purpose to explore.
After doing all that and completing Rainbow Road one final time, mirror mode becomes available for all standard races as a speed option. It doesn’t change the speed, but it does flip the races and give you a slightly different experience.
That’s all well and good, but the real deal is in free roam. By traveling to Princess Peach’s castle in free roam, it’s possible to hop through the giant stained glass window at the top in a reference to Mario 64. And this big weird secret takes you into an alternate world where everything’s flipped or left to right, kinda like reverse castle in Symphony of the Night if there were no purpose. It’s really just a very, very big map to explore where it’s harder to read the signs. That’s it. And I mean, we kind of love it for the fact that’s it.
5. A Whole Other Country in Red Dead Redemption 2
There’s a vast untamed wilderness to explore in Red Dead Redemption 2. And we’re not talking about the wild West desert that unlocks after beating the game. Once the story’s done and all the quests are complete, a full creation of the New Austin region appears on the western side of the map. And there is a lot to see.
The town of Armadillo is almost fully built, and there’s no quest to complete or real activities to take part in. It really only exists for the benefit of the Red Dead online mode. But there’s something else we immediately wanted to explore to the South — Mexico.
Another region from the original Red Dead exists but isn’t available to visit. You can see it across the river marking the border, but it feels pretty far away. With a few in-game and out-of-game cheat codes, it’s possible to wander around a surprisingly detailed recreation though.
Was this area covered in time or is it just so detailed because it was visible from the opposite shore and the sticklers for details at Rockstar San Diego wanted to make it perfect. Whatever reason it exists, it’s now a fun little mystery, a tantalizingly close add-on that feels like it should have been, you know, made. Maybe if Red Dead Online was successful as GTA Online, this area would’ve been finished eventually.
4. Kennel World in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
The dog house holds a big secret in the original Game Boy Color version of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. We always wanted to explore Zelda’s version of hell, but we didn’t think it would be so easy.
At Mabe Village, there’s a chain chomp latched to a doghouse. You can go inside the normal way or you can get spicy and phase through the wall and enter a door from the top. Doing that sends Link into a kaleidoscope of game assets creating a jumbled world that can actually be very useful under the right circumstances.
The glitchy world changes depending on how many enemies you defeated on your run so far. And sometimes you get handy stuff like a piece of heart. Most of the time, you’re stuck in a randomly generated dungeon. Actually, a really awesome weird little feature.
3. The Mystery of the Retro Discs from Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach
This is a series that’s practically built on breaking the game with meta stuff. Security Breach keeps that going with one of the weirdest secrets we’ve seen in years.
All over the game, you’ll find little collectibles called retro discs that don’t seem to do anything. Most video games do have useless collectibles, so we didn’t think anything of it. But if you collect a very specific set of upgrade modules for your Freddy Fazbear robot — you ride around inside of a talking Freddy Fazbear robot in this game. Just go with it.
So you need those upgrade modules and you return to one of the starting areas of the game and there’s a secret wall to unlock. You take a photo of this suspiciously empty wall and a set of double doors appears. There’s a machine inside the super secret room with a player. By inserting the retro CDs, you hear cryptic voice messages. It’s creepypasta basically.
“Good morning, isn’t it a pretty day? No? What’s the matter? Oh, right. Too bright. I’ll pull the shades. Better. When the shades pulled, it feels like we’re in a cubby hole or a cave. Yeah?”
Like we’re not Freddy Fazbear experts over here. We’re just trying to play a video game. We don’t really understand anything about this crypto key strike. We just appreciate that it exists. We didn’t think those things had the discs. They had any purpose at all, but there was one.
2. Mike’s Room from Deltarune Chapter 4
Another room that seemed impossible to enter. It’s one of the most mysterious also for a variety of reasons. The identity of Mike was already a huge talking point online in certain circles. People tried to decipher who this character was and why they’re seemingly so important. And like everything else in Deltarune, it’s a big joke with the player as the punchline.
Located around Dark World Town in Chapter 4, you get a brief chance to visit before kicking off the main story proper. Inside one of the buildings, there’s a locked door that requires a code. We beat this thing and never once found a clue on this door. Turns out the clue was the door.
The code is simple: input the word MIKE on the numeric keypad. M is six, I is four. It’s keypad like on an ATM or a phone. Remember T-9 keypad texting? Yeah, that’s what you’re doing here. And it leads to a weird room with the most experimental boss fight in the series.
To defeat Mike, you need a working microphone. Making noises moves your heart. And the only way to win all three rounds of this ridiculously tough fight is that. And it only gets tougher if your microphone isn’t properly calibrated.
And after all that, there’s still a secret we never thought we’d see. The real Mike. And if the fight is over, there’s a dark area to the right. You walk down this long dark hallway, it leads to Mike’s true identity — a giant photorealistic image of a microphone. I don’t know what we were expecting, but it was not this.
1. Climbing the Cheydinhal Cathedral in Oblivion
There’s a lot of areas you’re not meant to go at the start of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Using a combination of acrobatics and magic, you could bounce all over the map though. We’re using a bit of a dirtier trick to get on top of one of the tallest locations in the game.
Cheydinhal Cathedral’s a huge structure and we want to climb it just ’cause it’s there. Sure, we could painstakingly jump from spot to spot like platforming experts or we could just cheat with one of the most infamous glitches in the game that somehow still works. It was patched in the Oblivion Remastered but never fixed in the original.
By dropping the paintbrushes, players can climb literally anything. The paintbrushes — their blind spot from Bethesda. The developers forgot to program physics into these objects, so they simply float midair wherever they’re dropped. They also have a really big hit box. Your character can somehow balance on top of a paintbrush without slipping off. It’s the best way to make a set of stairs in the game. And it’s always funny.
So we’re using it to climb on top of the cathedral. No, there’s nothing up here and I mean, does it matter? It’s all about the journey, like the rest of this list, not the destination, guys. Well, I mean, it’s kind of about the destination. Just there’s nothing at the destination, okay? Not by default anyhow. It’s there. That’s the reason it matters. It’s just that it’s there. In fact, the journey doesn’t really matter that much. It’s the destination pretty much entirely here. It’s not that the destination is satisfying though. It’s that the destination is there.
And that’s 10 locked areas we struggle to get into in video games. What do you think? Leave us a comment. You got some favorite weird locations that are actually explorable? Maybe cut content sometimes? Just bizarre attention to detail? Leave us a comment. Let us know what you think.
And as always, thank you very much for reading this blog. I’m Zaid. We’ll see you next time right here on Aura Riot.
