The 5 Most Annoying Sidekicks in Video Games

Sometimes I have to wonder if game designers create escort quests and useless AI partners to get revenge against the asshole company they work for. While I agree that the video game industry is rife with abusive practices that need to be taken seriously, but why are you taking it out on the gamers? There are pettier things that can be done, surely? Rat turds in the boss' coffee? Morning danishes filled with horse laxatives? (This is a joke. I do not condone that in any way. Danishes shouldn't be treated that way.)

There are many ways a sidekick can become a hinderance rather than a helping hand. Their AI can be so poorly written and implemented that you wonder how this passed QA testing. Or maybe they talk too fucking much and have grating, irritating personalities. Or maybe they're just an escort quest pretending to be helpful. Nevertheless, let's begin our countdown of the 5 most annoying sidekicks in video games.

5. Barry (Alan Wake)

Alan Wake was a baffling experience. It seemed to be both a love letter to Stephen King and a parody that isn't actually a parody. It's one of those instances where everything is so cliché and predictable, you wonder if it was done intentionally as satire. In fact, if you play it while assuming it is a parody, it's much more enjoyable.

Though there was one aspect I did not like at all in either context - Alan's agent, Barry. He's a man that wears a Hawaiian shirt under a parka and that's criminal in of itself. He's an irritating presence that makes the missions tedious and there seems to be no purpose to him even being there. I can understand Alan wanting a break from his writing career, but taking your agent along is not how you do that. There's one scene where Barry thinks it's an excellent idea to get drunk in a house surrounded by shadow creatures. This isn't like hooking up in bar - the monsters aren't going to look any nicer the more you drink.

Overall, this game thinks too highly of itself to be in league of a best known horror writer.

4. Hewie (Haunting Ground)

Well, surely a dog can't be annoying! Dogs are the very embodiment of help, loyalty, and cuteness. Au contraire, mon ami. Haunting Ground is a game where a kidnapped woman runs from predators throughout a castle and if you are caught by them, you are either treated to a lovely sound bite of her being violated, her body being ripped open, or being raped depending on which psychotic pursuer trapped her. Because brutalization of women is something games can never have enough of apparently.

Politics aside, there's a dog in the game and his name is Hewie. He might be cute, but he is effectively useless. The game is really finicky about items that he won't pick up and you have to train him, which is a weird mechanic to put in a game about running from enemies. He's Fiona's guardian, chomping on their extremities as Fiona flees to a hiding space. Further research into the development of the game, it turns out Hewie was added because Capcom weren't sure a female protagonist would sell. Considering the fact that Fiona is scantily dressed and has jiggle physics, I think we can assume those features were added to sell the game, too. Not that I'm opposed to female characters expressing sexuality, I just hate it being used as a marketing ploy because they assume all gamers are Dorito-crunching, Mountain Dew-swilling teenage boys or 40-year-old misogynists with mommy issues. Oh, yeah, some of them are. But maybe you don't have to do this shit to appease them.

What was my point? Oh. The dog is bad at dogging. It kind of takes away from the game when your sidekick refuses to pick up objects you need to progress the plot. If you remake that game, Capcom, maybe turn Hewie into a Golden Retriever instead? Might help.

3. Roman Bellic (Grand Theft Auto IV)

I never thought I would hate bowling or titties as much until I encountered Niko Bellic's annoying fucking cousin. It's good to have hobbies, Roman. You can enjoy motorboating all the titties you want, just do it far away from me! I honestly have not played a lot of GTA4 because the driving controls were janky and I hated doing chase quests. If you want to make a character endearing, this is not how to do it. Like seriously...if you had a real life cousin that wanted you to take him bowling five times a week, wouldn't you rather become estranged?

Niko and Roman share awful childhoods with horrible abusive fathers which garners some sympathy points for Roman. But he's also reckless, lying to Niko about being wealthy when in reality he's several thousand dollars in debt. He gets in trouble with a Russian mob and Niko has to save his sorry ass many times. I understand family ties and blood, yada yada, but I also understand toxic people. You might win in the Good ending, Roman, but you will forever will a loser in my book.

2. Eileen (Silent Hill 4: The Room)

Silent Hill 4: The Room was a polarizing edition to the Silent Hill franchise, though in retrospect since the subsequent releases of the Western Silent Hill games, SH4 has been vindicated by fans. Well, the story has. The gameplay, ehhhhhh...hit or miss. The combat is actually a bit better because Henry might have the personality of a damp newspaper, but he has a batter's swing like (*sneakily looks up baseball...batters? hitters*) Ty Cobb! He even has a snazzy wind-up animation while charging his attack. Seriously, all that power wrapped up in such a drywall plaster of a man.

I could hardly give you a short plot synopsis of the game, it's so fucking whacky, yet morbidly compelling. I'll try: Henry is trapped his apartment for almost a week, finds a hole to climb through in his bathroom, ends up in several dimensions filled with monsters and grotesque facsimiles of real-world places, and learns that it's all because of a serial killer named Walter who thinks Henry's apartment is his mother.

Got all that? Can you tell it's a Japanese horror game?

The first half of the game is exploring five different locales where you encounter a person who eventually ends up being slaughtered by Walter, who then signs his work by numbering the corpses. Eventually, Walter's ironsight focuses on Eileen, who is your neighbor that you've been stalking through a peephole in your apartment wall (because Henry's desperately trying to get help, not for any other reason, of course). Walter nearly kills her, but is stopped by the kid version of himself, a manifestation of the abused child he used to be who still felt a semblance of conscience. Turns out when Eileen was a child, she came across a homeless Walter with her mother and gave him a doll. The lonely Walter felt so touched by her kindness that he cried. So, he paid her back in kind by almost killing her. You see, he's being a gentleman. He didn't fully kill her, he almost killed her.

Thus, begins the second half of the game in which you must drag the injured Eileen back through all five worlds, while this time being pursued by Ghost!Walter trying to shoot you. Eileen's leg and arm are broken, so she limps in fucking high-heels after Henry. Seriously, all those apartments you search through, Henry couldn't pick up a pair of tennis shoes for her?? She had been getting ready for a party before Walter showed up to batter her, so now she has to stay in her purple cocktail dress and pumps while running from a serial murderer.

I hate when horror games do this. So much goes into adding sex appeal that they skip on practicality. Do you know that it is impossible to walk on grates in stiletto heels? She gets away with it because "video game logic" but it's still annoying. Just once I want there to be a female protagonist who changes out of her formal clothes into sensible togs for a survival horror situation. Eileen will complain if Henry is running too fast for her to catch up. Eileen could take advice from Ashley Graham from Resident Evil 4 (the original version - typing that just gave me an existential crisis) and hide in a dumpster while Henry figures shit out. Or as Yahtzee Croshaw put it succinctly, "At least Ashley knew her place - it was in a bin!"

Eileen can't climb ladders because of her broken arm, meaning you have to leave her undefended while you figure out a way to rig an elevator to work. This is risky because the more damage she takes, the more she becomes possessed by Walter. Equipping her with her handbag weapon is even worse, because she goes looking for fights instead of staying out of the way. Also, yes, equip her with her handbag, because Henry couldn't lend her a damn golf club or two. I guess I should be happy she wasn't given a tampon gun or bra slingshot.

Silent Hill 4: The Room is still worth a play. The apartment hauntings and Walter's twisted backstory are the good parts and I would even argue that it's the scariest concept. Your apartment is your sanctuary and it starts getting corrupted, all sense of personal safety evaporating with each otherworldly perversion. Eileen's still a sympathetic character, despite her shoddy programming. But sometimes...sometimes you will want to leave her ass behind.

1. Sheva Alomar (Resident Evil 5)

Good Lord, where do we start? Well, her introductory scene for one. The first time we see her, the camera is aimed directly on her ass.

Really, Capcom?

Capcom were already facing heavy controversy because the RE5 demo featured a buff white guy gunning down villages of Black African locals. Which is weird considering the American government's stance on police brutality against Black citizens and mass school shootings that have only gotten exponentially worse than 2009. But it's a video game and they are the scapegoat blamed for all the evil in the world, despite the bloodiest genocides happening before the first gaming console was invented.

ANYWAY, that controversy eventually died down and a new one took its place: Sheva. Specifically, AI-controlled Sheva. My God, whomever programmed her must have had a vendetta against Capcom because she was infinitely useless as a partner. Do not give her the valuable guns and ammo. She will waste it all. Also, it's best to only give her one type of gun, the machine guns, because she has the tendency to rely on her pistol despite having better weapons. The inventory management is also shitty because it doesn't make sense. Bulletproof armor takes up a slot, ammo and guns also take up their own slots. Individual grenades take up one slot each, which is infinitely dumb. Unstackable items are the bane of my existence. What is the point of having this type of inventory system if you're not going to stack the items? You'll have to swap items back and forth just to pick up new gear and Sheva sometimes fucks it all up by giving you something you didn't want.

Sheva also wastes healing items, using up large First Aid Sprays for the tiniest hit. She has the tendency to get her ass killed, which results in a "Your Partner Died" message. Overall, these poor game mechanics and her shoddy AI ruined her as a character. She had an interesting backstory and determination for fighting BOWs, but it's all overshadowed by how poorly she's programmed. It's best to play this game co-op if you want to enjoy the story.

And that's my list! Do you have any you think I missed? Why don't you let me know in the new comments section. Thanks for reading and I hope you'll tune into whatever I post next.