Already Undone for You

The opposite of Already Done for You.

So you're racing against the Big Bad trying to be the first to reach the Artifact of Doom. You overcome the poison dart Death Trap, defeat the Threshold Guardians, work your way through a complicated dungeon to find the missing key, and unlock the door to the room to find... that he's already there. He got through the Death Course just before you did.

...so who went through the area after he was done, putting the poison dart back into the wall, resurrecting the guardians, locking the final door behind him and putting its key back at the bottom of the dungeon?

A special kind of Fridge Logic that asks how the scenario returned to its initial conditions if the situation should logically have called for Already Done for You. A Reset Button that hit the terrain just before you got there. Can involve Respawning Enemies and/or an off-screen Puzzle Reset.

Many situations of this type can be explained away with a Hand Wave, and the temptation to do so on this page will likely be great. Common justifications include giving the Big Bad a special pass that prevents the traps from triggering, or saying that the Big Bad himself set the traps to discourage pursuit. Recognize, however, that most of these justifications have already been presented several times and erased because this isn't the place for them. Take all discussions to the discussion page.

The complementary half of this trope is Took a Shortcut. Whereas that trope asks how a person got somewhere faster than you, this trope is more concerned with why his passage didn't disturb the environment.

May be related to Chaos Architecture. Compare Durable Deathtrap. Contrast Already Done for You, obviously. Related to Edison's Lament, particularly in cases where there's no fathomable reason anybody would put the switch in the wrong position in the first place. Also related to Offscreen Teleportation and Mobile Menace. When it's not only the "how" but also the "what" that doesn't make sense, this is a Solve the Soup Cans puzzle.

Literature

 * In Harry Potter, Harry, Ron, and Hermione go through the trials set up to protect the titular stone, even though already got past them some time ago. To be fair, the trials are all magic, and there are a few signs that  already went through (the flying key was battered from being shoved into the keyhole, the cave troll was knocked out, etc).

Tabletop Games

 * The legendary Dungeons and Dragons module "Tomb of Horrors" specifically states who resets the Death Traps and how, partially because the caretakers also perform a second function in the dungeon - punishing those who try to bypass traps through the ethereal plane, where they stay when not resetting traps.

Video Games

 * Justified in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: the Temple of the Ocean King is controlled by an Eldritch Abomination and his Phantom guards, and a skeleton outside of the Temple even tells you that the traps activate again after you leave.
 * As you progress through Portal, you leave behind boxes resting on top of buttons, destroyed glass barriers, a lot of dead or disabled turrets, and various other markers of your presence. Some of these obviously can be reset by GLaDOS; others, less so. So who went through the testing chambers cleaning up after ? Extra points for asking how directional arrows and stuff, drawn on walls that are pretty impossible to reach, got there.
 * And then Portal 2 explains it all by stating that.
 * In Half-Life 2, you follow the refugees' route out of the city. This route is filled with headcrabs, zombies, elaborate physics puzzles, and various and sundry obstacles to overcome. How did anybody not named Gordon Freeman get through there alive? And why weren't the physics problems already solved by the time you got there?
 * This is mentioned in the webcomic Concerned.
 * It's heavily implied that the zombies and headcrabs are new, as a result of the Combine strike against the railway as you make your way down. More than once you see headcrab shells land, as well.
 * The Myst series of games do a good job of providing a setting in which you are following in the footsteps of people who had been there before you. But most of the levers and buttons have been left in positions that leave the machinery in the least useful configuration. This is justified in Myst III: Exile, as the puzzles have been deliberately set up by the Big Bad. But in game 1, did Sirrus and Achenar go around resetting everything on the various worlds just for the fun of it before getting trapped in the prison books? In game 2, who left all of the bridges and doors in their locked positions, if some of them could not have possibly been closed from the other side?
 * In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Grodus enters the Palace of Shadow before Mario does and isn't encountered until the penultimate chamber. However, that doesn't explain how he got there - especially since it is impossible to.
 * Happens more than once in the original Tomb Raider. Somehow Natla's pesky human hirelings keep getting to the end chambers ahead of Lara, leaving the traps unsprung and the creatures alive.
 * Golden Sun is Egregious because in the second game, Alex discusses how poorly first-game antagonists Saturos and Menardi were at solving the puzzles, and they were so terrible, that they accidently.
 * But Averted Trope in the third game with the Konpa Ruins. A path is clearly shown for Noelle, a competent water adept, and Kraden to quickly travel to the center of the ruins (much faster than your path, anyway) where you meet with them.
 * God of War features this in spades. When Kratos traverses the dungeons to get to Pandora's Box/The Sisters of Fate, he finds that hundreds of adventurers have died trying to get the treasure as well. (Their bodies are lying all over the place, and you even fight a few others en route in the second game.) This is all very well and good, except that not only do many of the doors require all manner of oddly shaped keys to open (from a ram's horn to specific human skulls) but also in order to progress it is often necessary for Kratos to smash through walls and on occasion destroy entire buildings. Apparently the temples rebuild themselves every time someone eats it on the way there.
 * Justified Trope somewhat: the dead bodies of past adventurers are reanimated as Undead Legionnaire and are actually sent back into the temple to reset all the traps.
 * Sometimes, the puzzles aren't reset to their very beginning, leaving Kratos to finish a puzzle that a now dead guy started. For instance, in God of War 2, Kratos finds the Hail of Boreas
 * Played with in Resident Evil 4. As Leon explores around the village, he will encounter locked doors with missing keys scattered about in highly inconvenient locations, typically not too far from the other side of the door, forcing him to take the long way around.
 * In La-Mulana, is implied to have gone through the ruins first, but there are no traps sprung, items taken or bosses defeated. This was lampshaded on the official blog, then summarily forgotten.
 * Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is also full of this: whenever you open a secret entrance via instructions apparently only found in Francis Drake's journal, many of which require moving heavy objects or activating switches, chances are there are a bunch of heavily armed mercenaries down there waiting for you for no explained reason.
 * Sonic Heroes has two levels toward the end where the characters have to destroy battleships or parts of a giant battleship to progress. All four teams take the same route and none of them do it alongside another team.
 * Possibly justified with the Egg Fleet, which, as a massive air fleet, in which hundreds of airships are probably arranged in many instances of the same pattern, you could conceivably see multiple characters travelling what LOOKS to be a similar path. Admittedly, a stretch, but still, it's Sonic.
 * Played with in Dragon Quest VIII, where the Pirate Cove adventure features always just ahead of you-- but you frequently catch up with her because she's unable to solve a puzzle, which you then solve, only to have her jump ahead of you again. She also steals most of the treasure from the dungeon before you can get to it.
 * Similar to the above, in Breath of Fire II Patty is stopped at several points, and at one point she outright gives up and leaves while you're there, somehow getting ahead of you. There's a frustrating (in part due to a mistranslation), if somewhat amusing quest near the end of the game where you have to catch up to her by following a trail of clues, which ultimately lead you back to the Township you created, which may be ridiculous, considering that it may be how you've been traveling. That's right, she somehow snuck aboard your giant floating town and got upstairs without anybody noticing.
 * In Final Fantasy II, when the powerful White Mage Of Various Names That Start With 'Min' disappears while searching for the ultimate magic Ultima, you have to track him down. You do this by basically do everything he presumably already had to do - collect the White Mask and the Black Mask, get past the doppleganger, travel throughout powerful dungeons, and use the Crystal Key to open the Mysidian Tower. Yet when you reach the final door before Ultima, you find that he made it there too. How, exactly, the White Mage managed to reach this point without doing any of the prerequisites is a bit of a mystery.
 * It's noted that there's more than one Crystal Rod - everyone stuck in had to have one in the first place. Presumably there's more than one way to get a Rod, but the heroes are stuck with the mask puzzles.
 * In Final Fantasy VI, there is an optional dungeon called Phoenix Cave, in which the player must split his party into two teams, and coordinate them so that each team pushes buttons on the floor that will clear the path for each other. At the end of the dungeon, the player finds the playable character Locke Cole, who had already crossed the entire dungeon. It is never explained how he solved all by himself puzzles that require at least two character in separate locations, or how the puzzles returned to its initial state after it has passed through them.
 * It does, however, explain why all the treasure chests are empty when you find them, and he gives you all the items he found in them after he rejoins you.
 * In Jak 3, just how the bloody hell did Veger get through the Precursor Temple and the destroyed palace crawling with Dark Makers before Jak? His coat, that's how!
 * The NES game Tombs and Treasure actually lampshades this in the beginning of the game, where the guide José tells the player that the monsters inside the ruins have rearranged everything to how it was before Professor Imes and his team stepped in and investigated.
 * A particularly bizarre example occurs in Mega Man X. Upon reaching Sigma's fortress, Zero explicitly tells you that he'll go ahead and deal with the enemies so X can slip inside unnoticed, then dashes off. One screen later, you're met with several enemies and no explanation...
 * Maybe while he was dealing with the enemies, the next wave was spawned by the time X got there, just like with most enemies you encounter throughout the game.
 * Actually an Aversion. Zero tells X he's going to deal with the enemies from the front so that X can slip inside through a back entrance (though since it's a 2D sidecrolling game you can't really go anywhere else), explaining not only why there were still enemies, but also why Zero had to teleport in when Vile appeared.
 * In Final Fantasy Adventure, at one point you get into a mining cart and, after a distance ride, go flying off the rails. You find yourself next to a dwarf named Watts, who you've been looking for. But if there's only one mining cart, who returned it to the beginning of the track for you to take?
 * Drinno, the dungeon under the druid school on Gratogel in Albion. Okay, so it's somehow full of deathtraps from a war between the druids and the Kenget Kamulos (a civil war so internal they fought it within one building, I guess), but how can there be a million puzzles and traps blocking your way when you're looking for someone who went through the whole thing not long ago?
 * In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, Dekar manages to follow the prince through a dungeon full of puzzles. Naturally, when you follow Dekar, not one puzzle is solved for you. Then, just to make things more bewildering, Dekar actually forgets how to do the easiest puzzle in the dungeon and asks Maxim for assistance. Apparently due to Puzzle Reset.
 * In Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, after Illidan proceeds through the Tomb of Sargeras to get the Eye of Sargeras, there are still a lot of monsters left for your pursuing group to fight. Probably justified since he's a half-demon and could hypnotize them or something.
 * In Knights of the Old Republic, you meet seemingly untouched ancient traps on your way to Plot Coupons in locations where you, story-wise, found the exact same things three years ago.
 * Radiant Historia's dungeon under the Granorg royal palace is the pathway to a ritual chamber all the royals go to once a generation to Save the World. When you go in there to stop the Big Bad from killing the MacGuffin Girl, who both went in there not five minutes before you did, it's filled with block puzzles and random encounters. Putting aside why such a vital place of power even has these things, why are they still active? While the Big Bad has an excuse for being able to pass them unmolested -- he's literally superhuman -- the lone MacGuffin Girl has no such excuse.
 * In Final Fantasy X you have to travel to specific temples and go through courses known as "The Cloister of Trials" in order to recruit additional beings to use for Summon Magic. In the first two Cloisters The Hero enters after the rest of the party already has, but finds the traps and puzzles reset for him. In other cases a different summoner has already gone through the trials or has just finished going through, but regardless everything is set up all over again for you.
 * Of course, the Cloisters are completely irrelevant to the actual plot, as the summons are brought about by the Summoner communing with their spirits. So not only does one have to wonder who's resetting them, one also needs to figure out why they're there in the first place.
 * This one makes more sense. The Cloisters house the, and they'd want a trial to be sure the potential summoner was worthy of using their power. Considering how often Sinn showed up, you'd also want those trials to be easily reset, in case there were no people around, like Ixion or the three sister's temple.
 * In Fallout: New Vegas, a resident of Northside says one of the more unpleasant duties they have is to regularily go into the H&H Tools Factory and clear out the corpses of unwary scavengers that have fallen victims to its traps and defenses. If you go there yourself, the place is full of robots, laser turrets, mines and traps, all functioning. Either the Northsiders are go good they can avoid all dangers (and yet haven't cleaned out the factory themselves) or they routinely reset the traps, fix the robots and lay new mines. Which leads to some rather nasty implications...
 * Very annoying in Epic Mickey where restoring your surroundings and making everything bright and colorful with ink or destroying them with thinner to make them drab and depressing determines the type of ending you get at the end of the game. All the effort spent thinning or inking specific locations disappear if you move into another area and come back again.
 * This is the central theme of Janitor, an interactive fiction game entered in IF Comp 2002.
 * In Tales of Phantasia, Cress and his company must solve several puzzles in mausoleum in order to reach Dhaos' seal. True to this trope, the party arrives at the end just in time to witness Mars and his minions unsealing Dhaos. Mars does, however, possess pendants neccessary to open the seal, so it's very likely he could use them as a pass.
 * In Pokémon Red And Blue you must defeat eight Gym Leaders, get through many mazes and destroy Team Rocket. In the end, you find out that somebody already did it right under your nose. The name:
 * Justified given that even in-universe, the gyms seem to exist just so you could get a challenge. They gave the badge to  but you still have to get it. Makes you still wonder how he got around despite being blocked by Team Rocket...
 * If we are to trust the anime, every trainer needs eight badges in order to enter the Pokémon League tournament in Kanto. Late in the first season we see Gary take on Giovanni - the leader of Team Rocket - in the Viridian City Gym, and lose when Mewtwo gets fielded. Gary ends up not caring, though, because as he shows Ash: he already has the eight required badges (in fact, he has ten!). Presumably you do not need only Kanto badges; but it's also explicitly stated that every Gym Leader can hand out badges to anyone who beats them. They are not unique items, and the Gym Leaders are not there to be as unbeatable as the elite. Hence Brock could take over as Gym Leader after his father, despite aiming not to even be a Gym Leader, but a breeder.
 * The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim justifies it - after you get swatted by that swinging log, or pivoting spiked door, you can then watch it ratchet back in place. Doesn't explain the fire traps with oil on the ground, or the infinite ammo in the dart shooting traps, though.
 * The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim justifies it - after you get swatted by that swinging log, or pivoting spiked door, you can then watch it ratchet back in place. Doesn't explain the fire traps with oil on the ground, or the infinite ammo in the dart shooting traps, though.

Western Animation
"Max: How did you avoid all the booby traps?
 * Played with in an episode of Max Steel which requires going through an Egyptian pyramid laden with booby traps. Max's method is to storm past all of them, and when they get to the main chamber they find the missing archeologist. The following conversation occurs:

Dr. Meyorkis: I assume the same way you did, by reading the hieroglyphs.

Max: Yeah...well, uh..."


 * It's unknown if the main booby traps were original to the pyramid, but