The ability to accurately discern what's going on in a game is something we often take for granted. After all, you can't play a game if you can't see and hear what's going on in it or properly interact with it. However, therein lies a particular meta-weakness that many game enemies know how to exploit.
Whether as a side effect of damage sustained by your player character or in a deliberate, fourth-wall-breaking attack on you, the player, some game enemies can attack and hamper your game interface, limiting your sight, messing with your controls, and tricking you into seeing things that aren't there.
9 Metroids - Metroid Prime
Since the very beginning of the Metroid series, Samus Aran has been getting facefuls of the titular beasties, and even from an outside view, it's unpleasant. In all the 2D Metroid games, Metroids will swoop down on Samus and latch onto her head, rapidly draining her Power Suit of its energy until she shakes them off.
In Metroid Prime, however, this mildly-alarming annoyance upgrades to full-on nightmare fuel due to the game's first-person perspective. After all, this was the first time we saw the world through Samus's eyes, which means when a Metroid latches onto her head, you get a full-frontal view of its fleshy maw. When a Metroid attacks Samus, all you can see is snapping, squid-like jaws.
8 Handsome Jack - Tales From The Borderlands
During the course of Tales from the Borderlands, unlucky Hyperion employee, Rhys, ends up with a holographic copy of none other than the late Handsome Jack wedged into his cybernetics. While he's infiltrating Hyperion's Helios satellite to find an upgrade for Gortys, Jack offers Rhys an interesting choice: upload his mind into Hyperion's mainframe, and he'll give Rhys complete control over the company.
Should Rhys turn this offer down, Jack will insist, forcefully tying Rhys down and connecting him to the system for the upload. While this is going on, you'll get the usual selection of dialogue choices, all of which involve Rhys radioing Fiona for help, but due to Jack's influence, all of your dialogue choices begin glitching out. No matter which option you select, Jack will intervene and force Rhys to tell Fiona that everything is fine.
7 Boomer - Left 4 Dead
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The Left 4 Dead games are all about being aware of your surroundings. After all, you'll never know when a Hunter is going to attack if you didn't keep an ear out for its distinctive growling. Out of all the Special Infected, though, one of the most deceptively dangerous is the bloated Boomer. The Boomer is surprisingly stealthy, given its stature, and when it gets close enough, it'll vomit right in your face.
When you get puked on by a Boomer, not only is your sight completely distorted for a few precious seconds, but the piercing melody of its signature theme song kicks in, disorienting and distracting you. By the time these afflictions wear off, you're likely already knee-deep in the frothing swarm of the Infected Horde.
6 Morpho Knight - Kirby And The Forgotten Land
If you've ever been subjected to a sudden loud noise and lost your sense of balance, you already have an idea of what Kirby goes through when he fights against the mysterious Morpho Knight in Kirby and the Forgotten Land. While Morpho Knight's primary playbook is made of gigantic, fiery sword slashes, he will occasionally warp close to Kirby and begin fluttering his ethereal wings.
If Kirby takes a direct hit from the resultant sound waves, not only does all the sound become muffled as his ears ring, but the camera tilts into an extremely disorienting acute angle. Somehow, this wonky angle manages to be even more dizzying than if the camera had been flipped entirely, as it necessitates you to crane your neck in an awkward fashion to keep your bearings.
5 Confusion Rats - Psychonauts
In Psychonauts, both Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp and the nearby Thorny Towers Asylum are absolutely lousy with loose Psitanium. Much like the mutated bears and cougars of Whispering Rocks, some of the local wildlife has developed psychic abilities from the Psitanium exposure, particularly the rats that populate the asylum's upper floors.
These rats are a major pain and impede Raz's ascent of the asylum - as when they get close, they'll self-destruct into a fog of Confusion. Just like when you get hit by a Confusion Grenade, this fog obscures your view of Raz with a green haze, reverses your movement controls, and randomizes your assigned psychic powers.
4 Asmodeus.exe - Pony Island
Leave it to the devil himself to make the world's most obnoxious artificial intelligence. In Pony Island, Asmodeus.exe serves as one of the guardian daemons of Lucifer's arcade machine. Unlike the likes of Beelzebub.exe, Asmodeus isn't interested in an in-game challenge, but rather a brain-teaser. He challenges you to maintain eye contact with him constantly as he asks you a series of simple questions. If you look away (or alt-tab out of the game), you lose.
As he asks his questions, though, Asmodeus will employ a variety of tricks to get you to look away, including randomly pulling one of your Steam friends' names to send you fake messages, and pretending to crash the game. Of course, that first trick doesn't hold up as well as it used to since Steam has since gone through UI changes, but it's still quite devious.
3 Rinzler - Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance
If you've seen Tron: Legacy, you'll likely remember the scene where Kevin engages in a disc battle with Rinzler, who runs up walls as the arena's gravity shifts upwards. You could guess from a glance that this is a rather disorienting way to fight, but in The Grid world of Kingdom Hearts 3D, we got to experience it firsthand.
During Sora's story in the world, he's also forced to confront Rinzler in the same arena, and just like in the movie, Rinzler will periodically run up the wall as the gravity shifts. Sora is caught up in the gravitational shift, forcing him to fight on the ceiling. Naturally, this results in your view being flipped, but despite what you may expect, your camera controls remain the same. This means having to contend with a normal camera against an inverted view, making it doubly-disorienting.
2 Ninetails - Okami
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While Amaterasu may be the primary user of the Celestial Brush and its techniques in Okami, she's far from the only one with such capability. Anyone with sufficient spiritual awareness and artistic talent can call upon the powers of the Celestial Brush gods, be they good or evil.
In an example of the latter, we have the villainous Ninetails, who isn't one to stand by while Amaterasu draws circles around them. When you bring up the Celestial Brush screen while fighting Ninetails, if you loiter too long, Ninetails will use its own brush to make scribbles and X-es to block you from using your techniques. Worse, Ninetails can also draw the patterns for Cherry Bomb, Galestorm, and Icestorm, punishing you for taking too long with your attacks.
1 Bowyer - Super Mario RPG: Legend Of The Seven Stars
If Toad's little diatribe about timed hits at the start of the game didn't clue you in, the characters of Super Mario RPG are quite aware of their existence as game characters, and some of them have the power to exploit that meta knowledge. The most blatant example of this occurs in the battle against Bowyer in the Forest Maze.
Not long into the fight, Bowyer will conjure up three tiles in the image of your Y, X, and A buttons - the buttons required to use special attacks, items, and regular attacks, respectively. Bowyer will launch one of his paralytic arrows into one of these panels, locking it down in the process. This means that, until Bowyer decides otherwise, the function tied to that particular button is completely unavailable to you. This can be a big headache if you're low on health and can't reach your items.