I've talked about The Sims series before, and it continues to amaze me just how family-unfriendly it can be. With its pastel colors, its complete lack of cursing, smoking, drugs, or anything that could be unsavory to the moral majority, its rules can be bent beyond breaking point. For example, a variety of confessions from across the internet have shown me players who create incestuous situations, paste in their favorite characters from various franchises for nefarious reasons, become eugenicists, or make a town of alien-human hybrids. And that's just the base game! With mods, the possibilities extend even further. For example, there are mods which allow men to become pregnant, mods which bring a variety of weapons into the game, and mods which bring in huge amounts of NSFW clothes and objects.

On this list, you'll encounter some of the grimmest scenarios wrought in The Sims. If you want to read about people who've created serial killers, traps which rival those in Saw, carnivorous plants to feed troublesome people to, and scenes which genuinely reminded me of something from Black Mirror. What about you? What have you gotten up to in your Sims games, and how do they compare to these nightmares? I'd love to hear your stories, so drop them in the comments! I'm looking forward to what will be implemented in The Sims 5, and whether it's going to allow for even more horrifying situations.

25 Solitary Confinement

So, we all remember the classic way to murder your sims, right? Put them in a pool, delete the ladder, watch them swim about until they drown like some sort of cackling mad scientist. What about if you want to go even further though? Instead of destroying their body, how about destroying their mind? It’s quite possible, you psycho. You just need to put them in a room, preferably with some daunting prop, then delete the door. Unlike Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, they aren’t made for this, and will quickly be gnawing-on-the-walls crazy. Soon after, their various calls of nature and the lack of food will ensure that they fade into death due to the horrifying conditions. Can you call Amnesty International for stuff like this?

24 To Whom Do You Woohoo?

Like a magnifying glass on a sunny day, The Sims tends to bring out the very worst in those who play it. I get it. I mean, why play properly, when you could basically carry out horrendous social experiments? If you didn’t know, older sims can die from overexertion. One player took this idea and ran with it. They got friendly, and eventually more so with the older sims in their towns, before the eventual woohoo (to borrow a phrase) happened, giving the older sims a heart attack and killing them. Dark as hell. It gets worse, though. They’re making friends with death as time goes on, with their eventual plan being to woohoo with death himself. If they can eventually woohoo Death to…uh, death, that’ll be something worthy of congratulation.

23 It's Not A Swamp But It Works

Sometimes you read a story about something someone’s done in a game and it just makes your mind boggle. This is one of those times. In this story, a player said they created a character who was essentially Shrek. They lived in a prison cell in a basement, and adopted a bunch of kids. These kids would then be kept in the small room, but there’s a problem. There’s no food. They’d eventually starve under Shrek’s watchful green gaze, but not before he took photos of them and strung them up around his house. Please put this player on a list.

Now I know it’s just a game and all, but the idea of being imprisoned by Shrek sounds like maybe the most horrifying fate of all.

22 WALL THEM IN

So, The Sims 4 has ruined the previously mentioned classic Sims ladder-removal trick by making them able to climb out. Damn, how will we murder now? Well, you know, you can still…wall them in. That’s the solution one player came up with when he wanted to ruin/end lives. He allowed his sims to frolick happily in the pool for a while, only to build a wall around the pool, trapping them inside like some kind of aquatic oubliette.

It's an interesting proposition to consider, isn’t it? Like, I’m surprised by how placid the Sims who were being walled in must’ve been, just watching the walls go up around them and assuming all was going to be well. Maybe in The Sims 5 EA will make sims able to climb up walls like nightcrawler.

21 FAKE COP

As if the previous two stories weren’t bad enough, how about this player’s? They wanted to get all True Detective in their Sims story, making their main sim a cop. They then needed someone to chase, so they set about making a serial killer. Yep. Anyways, this character captured a girl off the street and threw her into a cell in his basement, and had him doing all kinds of creepy stuff, like making love heart cookies for himself and his captive.

This is also the same player who installed a mod that allowed him to woohoo with his family, which he KEPT doing. Apparently, the family tree was more of a straight line by the end of it. The character eventually started flirting with his descendants of his own free will.

20 Didn't Know You Really Could Die Of That

We’ve all experienced that horrible, stomach-gripping feel of absolutely crushing embarrassment, haven’t we? And I think anyone who’s been fired would probably say that it’s one of the worst experiences you can have. How about we combine the two? One player did just that!

The sim originally had an athletic job, but he made them quit it and take up livestreaming. They were raking in the dough from their streams, when they essentially realized they’d made themselves. They wanted to see what would happen if they got fired. Somehow they managed to get fired from self-employment, and as a result, the sim got so embarrassed they wet themselves, then promptly died. It’s a hard, hard life being a professional livestream, especially under the malevolent eye of a Sims player.

19 God Is In The Radio

Do you remember that episode of Black Mirror where people can have their consciousness put inside a little device, and they could then be made to experience thousands or millions of years of solitude? You may remember in the critical scene in that episode, the guy only had a radio playing Christmas music to keep him company for literally millions of years? One guy genuinely did that in The Sims.

They locked up their sim in a basement with nothing but a radio for company. The player doesn’t state if they were given a toilet or food, so they probably rotted to the sound of sim pop music. I really hope the AI is merciful when it becomes sentient and takes over the world, rather than locking us in a live-action version of The Sims.

18 Teen (Sim) Mom

Sims 4’s base game gives you numerous opportunities to be very cruel, but when it comes to mods, people’s evils sides flow like water. One of the strangest mods I’ve found is one that lets teenage sims get pregnant, because that’s not enough of a trial in the real world. Perhaps this could be combined with that other mod I discussed earlier which lets you get family members pregnant. It would expedite the progress of a warped family tree, at least.

There’s also another mod that lets people play out their favourite mpreg fan fictions in the Sims 4, letting male sims get knocked up. I don’t know why mods bring out the weirdest side of people, but it’s a theme you can see across pretty much every game.

17 Simlander

If you were confronted by the Grim Reaper who’d come to take you to the afterlife, you’d probably do whatever you could to prevent the journey, wouldn’t you? What happens when sims refuse to die? In one video uploaded by MrAkamoll, the player wanted to do just that. To do so, he talked incessantly to the Grim Reaper, before attempting to simply walk away. When that wouldn’t work, he just kept chatting to him, until the game crashed in protest.

This scenario so tickled a Kotaku writer that they decided to try and replicate the experiment in their own game. Unfortunately, the sim who was marked for death just died as normal, suggesting that MrAkamoll’s weird situation was just a hilarious bug, not a feature.

16 Rosemary's Simbaby

This may be more of a (un)happy accident rather than an intentional design choice by the developers, but sometimes glitches throw up the most horrendous things. This was a lesson learned by the Youtuber XFreezerBunnyX when one of their sims gave birth. The resulting child is a monster, plain and simple. Looking like a cross between a Demogorgon and some kind of unnamed Hellraiser antagonist, the baby is horrifying.

Equipped with the kind of sharply-angled limbs you’d normally only see on a Bigfin squid, it’s unintentional body horror at its finest. Oh, and its eyes protrude out of its head on glitchy stalks. And it merges with anyone it hugs, presumably attempting to possess them. It is something to be seen, and never forgotten.

15 Things That Go Bump In The Night

As kids, we were all scared of something. Whether it was the dark, a scary teacher, or the old classic, monsters under the bed. In The Sims 4, you can instruct child sims to look under their bed, checking for monsters. Nothing will be found. Most of the time. Occasionally, however, the opposite is true, and there really is a horrifying monster sat there, waiting.

Luckily for the child, they’re not entirely malevolent. In fact, they can be befriended by the child. If this is done, the player gets the opportunity to play with the monster, tell it their secrets, talk to it, ask about its life under the bed, or ask it to leave. Their appearances can also be prevented by the use of a Defender Wall Light.

14 WE'RE STILL MARRIED

The traditional marriage vow is ‘til death do us part, but apparently sims don’t see it that way. One player had their sim’s wife die in a fire, but when they rejoined the household in spectral form, they weren’t ready to leave their husband. Instead, whenever he was getting a little too friendly with another sim, she got extremely angry, and started her own fires in response.

Hold up though, it gets even worse. See, this wasn’t mischievous arson. The ghost wanted her own bloody revenge, and she’d get it in the worst way possible. Waiting until the new woman was pregnant, she’d plan an evil crime. Once the woman had given birth, the ghost would kill her in a fire, keeping the child as her own.

13 Polite Until The End

When a sim is ready to leave a party, they’re very polite about the whole thing. With a cheery wave of the hand, they always make sure to say bye-bye. However, one Sims player decided that he really didn’t want people to leave his banging party. So he walled them up. That’s a novel strategy for events management.

The result of this walling up is pretty hilarious. The sims in question got stuck in a chorus of never-ending “goodbyes,” until presumably, either the player’s mind cracked and they let them out or they died, polite ‘til the end. Until I read this story, I had no idea that every sim is secretly Canadian. Maybe in the next instalment in the series, we’ll get a Tim Hortons DLC.

12 Grand Theft Auto Meets The Sims

I talked a little about The Sims mods earlier, and how messed up they can be, but some players want to hit that ultimate taboo: murder. As old as The Sims themselves, these murder mods allow players to bring AK-47s and pistols into their game and commit simocide.

There’s a dizzying array of these kinds of mod available. Available ones include the Serial Killer Murder Mod, “Torture And Chaos” and the “Extreme Violence” mod. It’s the sort of thing that I would have thought was so cool when I was like 14, but now it’s just a bit embarrassing, to be honest. Oh, to be an edgy teenager again, when all you needed a game to have was some mindless, weird, and frankly jarring brutality.

11 Demon Cat Terrorizes Simville: More At 11

The paint tool in The Sims 4 is maybe the most misguided feature ever. Allowing you to paint whatever you want on your sim’s furry friends, people have daubed all sorts of things on their pets over the years. The most horrifying though? This demon cat, created by EightBitDylan. Bedecked in a paintjob (and that’s problematic) of white and red, it looks like it’s been feasting on either mice or, potentially, people.

On its forehead amongst all the white theatre makeup, you’ll find an inverted cross daubed in red. To add a final emo touch, the makeup under its eyes has run, making it look like it’s been crying about something lately. I think that if this entry proves anything, it’s that people would put makeup on their pets given half the chance.

10 Someone Call XCOM

So, if you fancy it, you can make human-alien hybrids in The Sims 4. What if you made a bunch of them? One player in The Sims 4 created a whole town of alien-human hybrids, before inviting everyone back to their original sims’ home and killing them in a variety of ways. The end result of this interbreeding en masse program was a huge graveyard in their backyard. After this, karma appeared in the shape of a huge number of mutant ghosts, which scared all the original sims to death.

Why they decided to kill the alien hybrids, rather than keep them around, I don’t know. Mind you, seeing as one of their abilities is mind controlling a human to do their chores, they’d probably have ended up bringing in humans as a kind of slave labour, and yeaaah, that’s even darker.

9 Budgeting Taken To An Extreme

I know it’s a cliché amongst internet geeky types, but we all love pizza, right? Well, sometimes you can’t order up a personal pan paradise, if you’re watching money closely. One sim didn’t get this memo, and was driving their family into the ground with their habit. So how did they stop this? They let the sim order a pizza, before putting it at the end of a long table in their back yard. The addict then sat at the other end of the table, and the player surrounded her with pools, preventing her from moving. She starved eventually. Seems a little harsh, doesn’t it?

I’m just kind of glad that my parents never used this method to explain the importance of managing a budget to me.

8 You're So Vain

The control the player has in The Sims 4 extends deep, deep into the game. You can even make the other sims in your town prettier. Some players take this to the extent of basically being Sims eugenicists. One player said that they had spent literally hours editing the looks of the in-game townies, changing their hair and clothes, just so their in-game children wouldn’t be ugly.

This kind of approach even extends into their approach to parenting, with the player confessing that they shower more attention on the prettiest siblings, letting the ugly ones do as they please. THIS IS WHY PEOPLE THINK DESIGNER BABIES ARE A BAD IDEA, PEOPLE! However, if this list has taught us anything, it’s that everyone basically turns into a psycho with The Sims.

7 Fanfiction Made Flesh

One player who’s evidently an avid Harry Potter fan decided that they wanted to fit something which incensed them. Rather than having Ron and Hermione end up together as happened in the series, they wanted Harry and Hermione to be the perfect family unit. To do this, they created the Gryffindor family and MADE THINGS RIGHT.

Whether they made Ron just to keep him confined to a basement and fed on fish heads, like Bart’s twin in that Simpsons episode, is not made clear. It makes me wonder how many people do this in their Sims games, to be honest. Do you think there are people out there creating all the Games of Thrones houses in their town? I don’t quite know if The Sims have the correct character traits for the Lannisters, to be honest.

6 When Parenting Goes Bad

We all remember what it was like to be a teenager. You want to lie in bed all day, and school can go to hell. One sim parent decided they needed to discipline their troublesome progeny. To do this, they locked him in a 1x1 room until he peed himself to death. It seems a little harsh, doesn’t it? Even as someone who had a pop at edgy teenagers further up, I can’t condone going quite that far. It’s also another one, like the budgeting example further up, that if it had been done to me, I would not be here! Honestly, even now if I had to pass that test, I may end up in the 1x1 room of doom. This player is another one for the old list, I do believe.