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{{quote|''"Only in a leap from the lion's head shall he prove his worth."''|''[[Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade]]''}}
A
If the character can jump horizontally far enough that his landing spot is not visible from the start of the jump, that too is a leap of faith if the platform doesn't scroll into visibility until after he's taken off.
A Leap Of Faith also occurs if there is a platform somewhere below the screen to land on, but there are still hazards around it. Thus, you end up having to guess where to position your character to land safely.
A careful level designer will ensure that any Leaps of Faith will be safe, or that [[Press X to Die|they are always fatal]]. If the designer is inconsistent about this, it can be a particularly maddening form of [[Fake Difficulty]]. Alternately, an [[Easter Egg]] or other secret may be hidden behind a random
If there are common, mostly useless powerups (like coins in [[Super Mario Bros.]] or rings in [[Sonic the Hedgehog]]), it's common to indicate pits where a
Compare [[Behind the Black]], [[Trial and Error Gameplay]], [[Fake Difficulty]].
{{examples}}▼
If you're looking for the Steve Martin movie, see ''[[Leap of Faith (film)]]''
▲{{examples}}
== [[Film]] ==
* ''[[Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade]]'' is a rare non-interactive version of this trope. Because, apparently, in Indiana Jones's world, the ability to see in 3D using binocular vision [[Reality Is Unrealistic|doesn't exist.]]
* A similar scene occurs in ''[[The Librarian]]'': for the [[Action Girl]] it's a
* ''[[Toy Story (franchise)|Toy Story]]''. Buzz jumps off the bannister in Sid's house because he believes he can fly.
== [[Literature]] ==
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* The [[
* The ''[[Mega Man X]]'' games were fond of these. You could [[Wall Crawl]] (well, really, Wall Slide) and find that the screen would begin scrolling if there was something below. If it was a pit of instant death, it would not scroll and you could easily hop out.
** The ''[[Mega Man Zero]]'' and ''[[Mega Man ZX]]'' series continue this trend, though ZX adds a long-range item scanner which removes the guesswork from the process when you use it.
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* ''[[Super Paper Mario]]'' hides clues indicating which pits will reward a Leap of Faith.
** Even if you jumped and were wrong, though, it only did 1 point of damage and teleported you back to the place you had just jumped from.
* Mostly averted in the [[Sega Genesis]]-era 2D ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' games; almost ''any'' place where you can pitch yourself into space will either have a long landing strip or a wall that stops you from going too far. Later 2D games -- ''Sonic Rush'' is particularly [[Egregious]] if you're not on the highest possible
** A certain spiked pit in Mystic Cave, however, offers no chance of escape should you fall into it expecting another lower path. This is fatal, as there are no ways of escape, and the pit is too deep to leap out of, even if you had Super Sonic's improved jump height.
* There's a level with this as its name in [[N]]. {{spoiler|You leap off the platform and hit the wall, then wallslide down---hitting the Trap Door switches (hidden behind gold) that create stairs and platforms for you to safely reach the exit.}}
* The Empire Strikes Back game for the [[Game Boy]] consisted of nothing but this. With floor traps on virtually every level that were almost always one hit kills and no guide or maps available at the time, to beat the game required taking a never ending chain of leaps of faith until the player memorized the layout and learned when it was safe to jump into the abyss and when it would kill you. This is also an example of [[Trial and Error Gameplay|trial and error.]]
* The Donkey Kong Country game for the SNES absolutely ''reveled'' in this; there is absolutely no way to [[
** A careful analysis of ''[[Donkey Kong Country]] 2'''s use of this trope is available [https://web.archive.org/web/20131114124101/http://www.sirlin.net/articles/the-secrets-of-donkey-kong-country-2.html
** In a couple of them, you can just see the top of a barrel, but not often. However, the port to the GBA made several of them more obvious, and removed a couple, such as the one at the start of the first minecart level.
* Many of the earlier top-down ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]'' games made it very hard to tell which pits led to a lower level and which dealt damage. You had to look carefully to see if the pits were totally black, or if they had a pattern in them representing the floor below. In more recent, 3-D, ones, not only is the bottom of pits almost always clearly visible, "bottomless" pits will often be over ''different parts of the same area''.
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*** Looking again, it's actually fairly easy to tell which pits are safe to jump in: the ones that aren't filled with water or lava are always okay.
** Ocarina Of Time had one Death Mountain ledge with either a Heart Piece or a Gold Skultula. If you moved the camera around you could see it, but you had to know to move the camera around.
* ''[[Super Smash Bros.]] Brawl'' has only one example, which is still annoying. In the last part of the game, where {{spoiler|they make you repeat [[Boss Rush|almost everything]], there are a few new areas. One of them is a wooden area based on a past one, which ends with two [[Bottomless Pit|bottomless pits]], only one of which will actually kill you. The other leads to a necessary battle. Since they are so close together, the map won't tell you if you're too far off from the door in question, and you scroll down with both. However, although it's incredibly obvious which one is the deadly one when it scrolls down, at that point you are too far down to do anything about it but struggle until losing a life}}. Luckily those lives can be quickly replenished.
** In one area (The Path To The Ruins, if he recalls correctly) there is a series of what seem like narrow, bottomless pits, but one of them actually leads to a door hiding one of the item boxes necessary for [[
* ''[[Conquest of the Crystal Palace]]'' has two such levels where falls don't kill you; instead, you get bumped back to a checkpoint near where the series of pits was. In one case, you can actually fall into a pit and discover an easy-to-defeat [[Bonus Boss]] that coughs up a one-of-a-kind Moon Mirror, which destroys all non-boss enemies (but [[It Only Works Once]]).
* ''Bible Adventures'', the ''David and Goltiath'' game, last level. The reason why [[The Angry Video Game Nerd|AVGN]] couldn't beat it.
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** Subverted in that depending on camera angle you'll sometimes be able to see the cart or haystack, and either way a Leap of Faith from a View Point will ''always'' result in a safe landing.
*** On the other hand, it's possible to miss if jumping from ''just'' far away enough from the "bird poop" that the game doesn't register your Assassin as being in position, or if you move the Assassin in the wrong direction when making the jump. The latter also applies to making Leaps of Faith from normal rooftop edges.
*** There is one view point in
* At one point in ''Last Ninja II'', you have to walk up to a lake shore and jump on the island on the lake. However, you have no way to know that the island is there or that you have to jump at it (it's on another screen) - you see it only if you manage to jump on it. Worse, you have to jump from a specific spot - otherwise you'll immediately fall in the water ([[Super Drowning Skills|and subsequently die]]) without even seeing the island. The nearby swarm of killer bees which depleted your health at a very fast rate and was nearly impossible to avoid didn't help much.
* ''[[Cosmos Cosmic Adventure]]'' has many of these, because though you can look up and down, you can't look past the sides unless you physically walk or fall there. Also, the screen is pretty zoomed in, so maybe Cosmo has bad eyesight. Often, the player is [[Follow the Money|guided to new areas by strings of stars, fruit, or other items floating on the screen in line or arcs]] for no apparent reason.
* ''[[Quackshot]]'', which casted [[Donald Duck]] in the role of [[Adventurer Archaeologist]], had a section where you had to cross a vast canyon using invisible floating platforms which wouldn't appear until after you'd already jumped onto them.
* ''[[I Wanna Be the Guy]]'' loves this trope ''almost'' as much as [[Spikes of Doom]].
* Like the Donkey Kong example at the top of the page, many of the secret areas in ''[[Painkiller]]'' are guilty of this, specifically in levels where finding all the secret areas or their contents was a requirement for the [[
* ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'' has something like this in Test Chamber 18 - the large room with a spinning energy ball launcher is, apart from the side where you start, the other side, and the unreachable platforms with turrets on them, almost entirely a [[Bottomless Pit]] / [[Super Drowning Skills]] hybrid where "the floor here will kill you"- except for a small area next to the starting side, which you would never check to find at the beginning but becomes important at the end when you need to pull off a slingshot maneuver with [[Chekhov's Gun|the door wall you used to enter the room]].
* ''[[Pokémon Red and Blue]]'' have an example in the burned-out laboratory, although a nearby scientist will point out the jump to you.
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* Lagoon of the many SNES rpgs has instant death upon a missed jump. Unfortunately, many major areas require them. It doesn't help the death also means Game Over.
* The original [[Rayman]] game has several of these, but they are generally indicated by minor powerups, and aided by the character's ability to look up and down.
* The third episode of a shareware [[Platform Game]] [[Secret Agent (video game)|Secret Agent]]. At one point, you're supposed to enter a teleporter, which will deposit you on a very short ledge with a robot walking on it. You're supposed to teleport just at the right moment, so that you can kill the robot (which becomes vulnerable to your attacks only every few seconds for a short time) immediately after teleporting (otherwise it will cause you [[Collision Damage]] and eventually kill you). The catch? You cannot see where the robot is before you enter the teleporter. (Even more infuriatingly, it's just a few pixels beyond the screen.) Therefore, it's purely a matter of luck (very good luck) whether you'll manage to kill the robot or die horribly.
* [[Super Mario Bros. 2]] (US) had a
* Unlike nearly every classic 2D game in the series before it, [[Castlevania]]: Rondo of Blood has no bottomless pits (even though [[Super Drowning Skills|most water bodies count as this]]). Jumping into a pit usually reveals a part of the level that is only accessible this way - while sometimes this is also a way to punish the player, it is also often the only way to discover many of the [[
** Super Castlevania 4 also has a different variation of this: there's a pit right next to the stairs leading to Dracula and considering the overall difficulty of the game, most people won't give it a second thought especially since all other pits in the game just kill you. However this one has an invisible platform over most of it, and if you stand in the very corner of it, you'll be rewarded by a rain of hearts, a cross, a triple shot and a health restore in case you're missing any. However, notice the word "most" in the previous sentence: it's still very possible you'll walk off the invisible platform and fall into the actual pit while trying to backtrack.
* In [[Silent Hill 2]] and [[Silent Hill 4]], you are required to jump into a very deep hole several times throughout the game.
* In the game ''[[Eye of the Beholder|Eye of the Beholder II]]'', there is a puzzle for which the clue is given of "faith is the key." In the puzzle, a sequence of 4 doors in a corridor must be opened by pulling four levers such that each lever opens a pit in front of the previous one, meaning that the fourth door-opener lever is inaccessible across a pit (albeit not a [[Bottomless Pit|bottomless one]], since the game doesn't have those). The trick, in this case, was to open the first 3 doors, walk down the partially opened corridor, and push a [[Pixel Hunt|misaligned brick]] on the wall, at which point it becomes possible for the player to make a
* A puzzle sequence in the original "Eye of the Beholder" includes a part where you must jump down a pit in order to continue, an act that would normally injure everybody in the party. A nearby wall engraving reads "one leap of faith", and upon actually jumping down the pit, the party takes no damage.
* Older 2D [[Metroid]] games featured similar moments in the form of Lava/Acid pools, where in later levels a path to a secret or the rest of the level is hidden behind a pool of normally hazardous acid that vanishes as soon as the player falls in. Fortunately, these pools aren't one-hit kills, so at worst jumping into a pit will take a few ticks off the health meter.
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* [[Final Fantasy VI]] - At one point in the plot, you run out of places to go except down a large waterfall. Your options are "Jump!" and "You crazy?".
* ''[[Bug!]]!'' has a ''truckload'' of these, ''especially'' secret areas ([[Shifting Sand Land|Reptilia]] comes to mind). Want to find a secret area? Just jump off into the foreground, and "hopefully" land on a platform leading to the secret area!
* Some items in ''[[Dark Souls]]'' require this. There's even an item, the Prism Stone, to determine the lethality of falls. Another example in ''[[Dark Souls]]'' is entering the Abyss, a black void zone used for a boss battle. It requires a special ring to enter, as well as a
* ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]: [[Skyward Sword]]'' features a moment in which you must jump off a ledge into what seems like a lava pit. When you're falling, a platform appears just above said lava pit. However, the game does tell you that you have to leap off the edge.
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* In the [[wikipedia:Visual cliff|Visual Cliff]] experiment, researchers placed babies and mothers on either side of two small, raised platforms. The mother then began calling for the baby. The trick was that there was a clear plastic floor over the gap, and the baby could quite safely crawl across it to the other side. The experiment was done to find out how soon we develop depth perception (and the instinct to ''not'' make leaps of faith).
** Most of the babies (of several species) refused to crawl off the cliff. Human babies would generally do it until they reached a certain age, or if the mother acted frightened of the gap. Baby turtles would attempt to dive into the glass, confusing the cliff with a pool of water.
* In the Grand Canyon, there is a skywalk made of 2 inch thick glass (they drove a semi across it to show its durability). The Native American tribe who runs it keeps the skywalk polished so the center of the walkway appears nearly invisible.
* One example was in the Menlyn Mall in Pretoria, South Africa (the largest mall in Africa and largest enclosed mall in the Southern Hemisphere). It's under a roof but the main hall has an open plan, with higher levels only having floors around storefronts so that you can see the roof from the ground floor. This means that on higher levels, you need to cross footbridges to get to a store on the opposite side of the same concourse. Near one entrance, there was a specific bridge made of clear glass. People refused to cross it, preferring instead to go around the entire hall... so eventually it was sandblasted, and people now use it without a second thought. (Obviously, women wearing dresses had [[Panty Shot|other reasons]] not to cross it, but still.)
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Fake Difficulty]]
[[Category:Video Game Difficulty Tropes]]
▲[[Category:Leap of Faith]]
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