No-Gear Level

Not the proudest moment in Raiden's espionage career.

"To you who has traveled to this island... I present you with a challenge. In your travels, you've relied on the equipment you've found along the way. Here, you must cast this equipment aside and face this trial with only your wits and whatever you can scavenge."

— Korgu Chideh, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

A level where the player is stripped of all weapons and equipment. It most often is justified by having the character arrested/captured/imprisoned (usually in a case of Cutscene Incompetence), but there are other means of losing your stuff, such as an airplane crash or shipwreck. In some cases, the player has to go undercover to infiltrate an enemy building, so they must willingly give up their weapons. They may be able to acquire new weapons and equipment, rebuilding their inventory as they go along, or may just have to complete a segment of the game by using abilities which are not so easily removed, such as stealth, unarmed combat, or innate powers or magical abilities, though the latter may also be disabled. This may involve a Full-Frontal Assault if they're missing their clothes too.

If the player is ever able to regain their original inventory, expect it to be stashed all together in an easily accessible package, unused by the enemy.

See also A Taste of Power (an inversion of this which gives you late-game equipment in the very beginning of the game), Second Hour Superpower (when the first level is played without gear), Bag of Spilling (loss of equipment between games), So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear, No Item Use for You, and Non-Combatant Immunity. A variant of Unexpected Gameplay Change.

Examples

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Video Game examples

Action-Adventure

Apotheon has a short sequence of this during the mission to get the Lyre of Apollo. In which, all you have is a torch and your fists until you find your things. Granted, weapons are scattered along the way to make it easier.
Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django has a brief segment in the beginning where your Solar Gun is stolen and you have to rely on fists until you find a sword, as well as a challenge from Lita to get through a dungeon using only your bare hands.
On your way to finally put down Gary in Bully (2006), you're met at the doors of the school and rather rudely stripped of ALL weapons. Including the infinite-ammo rubber-band ball and the infinite-ammo slingshot. It's Good Old Fisticuffs to finish your grudge.
The most annoying levels in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow feature the Chupacabra, a misnamed gnome-like thing that steals all your relics and magical items. You keep your fighting combos, but lose other skills like double-jump and dash, and you have no way to heal. When you catch up with the little runt he'll surrender your stuff, but sometimes there's a Cave Troll in between...
The Divide: Enemies Within starts you off in a barely functioning mecha, save for your basic cannons, where the first stage has you literally dragging your machine across the monster-infested world. Thankfully, the first area contains only three Skrits (the lowest-ranked variety of enemy), and you obtain repairs for your robot's leg joints shortly afterwards, allowing you to at least walk normally. You then gain better equipment in proper later on.
The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard has an instance of this when you are thrown into the catacombs.
Frogger's Journey: The Forgotten Relic: Both of Frogger's visits to the Black Lotus Hideout limit the number of abilities OPART has. The first visit occurs after they steal OPART, causing him to lose all of the abilities it gave him. The goal of the level is to retrieve it, but Frogger has none of his special abilities, so all he can do is hop around normally. The second time, OPART is only able to use the Long Jump and Push Blocks abilities due to Dusty sabotaging it by installing a Dark Relic into it.
Gato Roboto: You need to navigate the Ventilation area without your mech because it's too bulky to fit in. Since you die in one hit outside of your mech, the area is generous with save points.
Kya: Dark Lineage: After Brazul captures and imprisons you, you lose all your equipment and have to retrieve it. It's really difficult not being able to fight Wolfens or use your Boomy.
The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: During the game's prologue, Link arrives at the Forsaken Fortress via catapult and loses his sword in transit, requiring the use of stealth until the sword is recovered.
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: In Oracle of Ages, when Link's raft capsizes and he washes up on Crescent Island, the Tokay rob him of all his tools and Link has to find them all over the island.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has segments where Link becomes a wolf, rendering him unable to use weapons or items (the first time even involves you being captured and imprisoned). However, you can still fight about as well as you could in human form.
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword:
  - In the third trip to Eldin Volcano, you have to run around collecting all your gear after an eruption made you crash onto land and remain trapped in a cell. Thankfully, a supporting Mogma character retrieves the Mogma Mitts offscreen and gives them to you so you can escape — you can't get anywhere without those.
  - The Silent Realms don't allow you to use any items except the Sailcloth, because it's your spirit who takes the test, and all tools and weapons are material. If you alert an enemy, you'll just have to run away from them. To make it harder, they can kill you and wipe all your progress if they hit you one single time.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
  - When reaching Eventide Island, your inventory is magically taken from you as part of a trial and you have to scavenge new weapons in order to defend yourself against the monsters and complete it. If you know what's going to happen you can "smuggle" weapons from outside the island into the Trial by dropping them onto your raft before crossing the threshold.
  - The DLC Trial of the Sword casts you into a large 45-floor dungeon (Sword Monk's Shrine) with no items except the Paraglider and the Sheikah Slate, because it is your spirit venturing in the dungeon. This, notably, prevents you from "smuggling" items in like on Eventide Island.
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
  - The Proving Grounds Shrines has Link stripped of his clothes and weapons with the task to use surrounding items to defeat all the Constructs. The gear removal happens during the transition as you enter, so there's no opportunity to smuggle things in.
  - There's also a quest for the Lucky Clover Gazette where you need to show some researchers how to deal with monsters in your underpants. One of the researchers generously offers to hold on to your things for you, including anything you might have floated in with Ultrahand, which stops you from smuggling things in.
Little Big Adventure features a jail which strips you of your items, conveniently stored nearby once you disable the guard who comes into your cell, naively.
Metroid:
- Metroid: Zero Mission: The endgame, when Samus is stripped of her Power Suit and has to navigate a part of the game with just a "rather useless emergency pistol."
- Metroid: Other M has one at the end of the playable epilogue where Samus takes off her suit (and thus, all her gear) after she gets what she is looking for, only to get interrupted by a countdown sequence. Samus chooses to escape in her unarmored state using nothing but the stun pistol.
Psygnosis' O.D.T: Escape Or Die Trying has a level where you exit a prison and get jumped by four wardens. Then you find yourself not only without items, but also without spells.
Ōkami: During the final boss fight, all of your brush powers, the ones that you spent the whole game acquiring, are stripped away. In order to get them back, you must damage the boss the old-fashioned way — pummeling the crap out of it with melee attacks until you get them all back. This also occurs during normal gameplay if you are careless enough to run out of ink — your weapon vanishes as well, leaving you to fight with tooth and claw. Horrible during boss fights. Luckily, ink replenishes.
Prince of Persia:
- Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame has you drop your sword into a Bottomless Pit at the end of an unusual Boss Battle with a skeleton. This forces you to run from enemies until early in the next level, where you find a short sword which isn't as good. (Fortunately, you get to replace it with a better weapon two levels later.)
- Near the end of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Farah steals both your sword and the Dagger of Time to go complete the mission on her own. Thankfully, you get a ridiculously powerful replacement sword a few minutes later, but not before you have to run for your life from some hulking monsters. Unfortunately, it takes longer to get the Dagger back, meaning you have to be very careful as you inch along hundred-feet high scaffolds.
- This actually happens twice in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Near the beginning the Prince's ship crashes and he loses his sword. Once washed ashore, he has to do with a piece of driftwood and whatever secondary weapon he managed to grab off the enemies (amusingly, those weapons break with use, while piece of wood doesn't.) Then after the Disc-One Final Boss, Dahaka breaks his primary sword again. And the next sequence of levels involves eventually finding a new one. Said broken sword does absolutely no damage so you're stuck using grab moves and whatever secondary weapons you can scrounge up. Probably most problematic is that you're not likely to notice that your sword is broken until you actually get into a fight and realize your sword isn't what it used to be...
- The whole thing is lampshaded in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones when the Prince laments, "Why is it that every time disaster strikes, I find myself without a proper blade?" (This reference goes all the way back to the original Prince of Persia, where you start out unarmed.) Following that, you get a tutorial about Quick Time Event stealth-kills with a random knife he picks up.
In [PROTOTYPE], you lose access to all your selectable powers except for disguise for two whole chapters. Particularly annoying as it's an open world game, and you don't gain them back between chapters, limiting the number of side-missions you can do successfully at that time.
Ratchet & Clank:
- The series often avoids stripping Ratchet of his weapons (even when kidnapped and imprisoned in Going Commando, he keeps all of his weapons. However, there are still sections in which Ratchet is incapable of using Clank and his abilities, therefore relying on much more precise platforming, and arena levels which restrict Ratchet to one gun, or even just his wrench.
- Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters features Ratchet kidnapped and sedated, playing through a trippy dream level. When he wakes up, he finds himself stripped of his guns and must use his wrench and the guns of his that he finds strewn on the ground as he makes his way out. Eventually, he'll find the entire rest of his arsenal stowed away. Frustratingly, the game does not keep track of the way your quick select was organized before the level, and you'll have to reorder your inventory every single time you play this level.
Star Fox Adventures has Fox get imprisoned and his magic staff (the only piece of equipment he has, but which contains the staff powers he has gained thus far) taken off him in one stage. The stage thus revolves around sneaking around the prison to get the power needed to get it back by fooling the guard into thinking you're his replacement, so he'll leave.
Every Tomb Raider game does this at some point or other, to varying degrees (in some you lose your weapons but keep ammo and other items, in others you lose everything, and in a select few, you play a level or two where weaponry is simply not available).
- Tomb Raider I has Natla's Mines, where you get your weapons stolen by Natla's Quirky Miniboss Squad and have to spend the level taking them down one-on-one and taking back your Magnums, Uzi, and Shotgun in that order. What's nice is if you missed one of these three weapons before the level said mook will have one of his own, allowing you to claim his as your own and go into the final level with a full loadout.
- The Last Revelation and Legend have flashback levels where you play as a younger Lara where she doesn't carry weapons. These levels are focused on puzzles and platforming with enemies you have to avoid or find a way to disable them.
- It's worth noting that in Tomb Raider III, where you lose almost everything, med kits included, said loss is permanent. In addition, the player decides what order to complete the middle three of the five areas in, and if you pick a certain area last... Well, sucks to be you. It doesn't help that said area is listed as the last of the three in most official material (including the level select screen). The 2024 remaster changes this by having all of your collected weapons and ammo in a pile next to your pistols, thus you don't have to worry about losing everything.
- The final chapter in Tomb Raider Chronicles has one level where Lara must give up her weapon by placing it on a tray because the hallway nearby is a security scanner. Trying to go through it with a weapon will trigger some turrets and kill you quickly. Until you can disable the security scanner, Lara can either use chloroform to knock out guards or just avoid being spotted.
- In the 2013 reboot, when Lara is captured in the Solarii caves about midway through the game, she loses most of her weapons apart from the bow and arrows while she's escaping, requiring her to retrieve her lost guns as she advances through the mines and rescues her friends.

Action Game

Batman: Arkham Shadow splits the gameplay between Batman doing his usual schtick and Bruce Wayne going undercover in Blackgate Prison as Irving 'Matches' Malone to help his investigation. Naturally, Bruce can't take any of his gadgets with him in his disguise, so any prison brawls Malone gets into must be settled with his bare fists alone. Most notably, this includes the boss fight with Lock-Up.
Classified: The Sentinel Crisis has you wearing the Sentinel armor, a Powered Armor enhancing your strength, stamina, and detect enemies via radar, by default, but you lose it halfway through after being betrayed. For the escape stage, you're without said suit and need to find a pistol, infiltrate a laboratory, and obtain a prototype.
Devil May Cry 5:
- In order to get the "Who Needs Weapons Anyway?" achievement/trophy, you need to beat Mission 11 with nothing but Dante's bare hands. Hope you're good with Royalguard.
- In his final playable mission, V is trapped in another dimension where his familiars are taken from him. He must fight a short Boss Rush and has to retrieve his familiars against one boss at a time.
Certain stretches of Earthworm Jim have Jim teleported outside of his Super Suit, having to make due with pure platforming. The first stage of Evil the Cat's boss fight is even done in this manner.
Jim: [in the CD versions] I'm nuuude!
Harry the Handsome Executive makes this slightly more bearable than some other examples — the same challenges that cost you your weapons gain you magical powers.
Judge Dredd has you stripped of all weapons before stage 3, save for the pistol. All you have is the Lawgiver the entire game. You just lose the rest of your Abnormal Ammo.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has an interesting variation: Raiden still has all his gear, but he's so emotionally distraught he can barely control his cyborg body properly, making him slow, clumsy, and helpless if ganged up on, forcing you to sneak around enemies for a bit.
Oni: In the levels where you start with a weapon at all, you start with the pistol (and sometimes, a hypo). Otherwise, you start each level with no weapon, ammunition, or hypos... even when the level transition is (as in one particular case) ''walking through a door, into another room''. Good thing the hand-to-hand combat is so reliable...
The final boss in Viewtiful Joe 2 strips Joe and Silvia of their movie superhero powers. All the abilities you've bought and learned are gone. However, after a short pre-fight using their weaker forms, the spectators use Clap Your Hands If You Believe to revitalize the duo.
A variation exists in The Wonderful 101: During one level, you have all the skills and items you've acquired over the game, but you start the level with just ten Wonderful Ones in your party. For reference, when you first open a new save file, you start the game with twenty. This makes it extremely difficult to make use of Unite Morphs since a single hit scatters your forces every which way until you gather them up again. As a result, even weak enemies that were obsolete from the second level are suddenly challenging again since your attack power is weak and your evasive options are often locked due to a lack of Wonderful Ones.

Action RPG

Avalon Code has a particularly vicious form of this. The protagonist is a kid who's rather pathetic at combat but happens to come across the Book of Prophecy and becomes insanely proficient with any weapon that is literally pulled from within it. Then Chapter 5 ends after the Big Bad tricks a character into stealing the Book from you and attempting to use it himself, and another villain steals it in the aftermath — on top of an All of the Other Reindeer moment that neighbors Phantom Brave proportions and you're back to being a puny kid. Heath decides to fix that and teach you to fight without weapons — which you have no choice but to do for the entirety of Chapter 6.
Cyberpunk 2077:
- The player must go without their weapons for the big Heist that closes Act 1. When everything goes to hell, the only weapons you will have available to you are Yorinobu's gun (as well as Saburo's katana if you headed up to his transport on the roof) and whatever hardware the Arasaka goons you have to go through will be packing.
- In the main gig "Automatic Love", the player must give up their guns to enter a brothel named Clouds. Of course, the gangsters inside are armed and stealth-killing them is easy, so the player isn't unarmed for long.
- The side gig "Sweet Dreams" has you falling for Schmuck Bait in the form of a "preem BD" that gets you knocked out and sold to the very same scavs that you and Jackie took down in the very first mission. You then have to get your equipment back and deal with the scavs however you wish. Thankfully, while the scavs have taken your gear, they've not taken any of your cyberware or quickhacks, which you can use to ruin their day in short order before heading back to the guy who sold you the BD for a little payback.
- Phantom Liberty adds the main quest, "Killing Moon." Unlike the above, your cyberware is disabled for part of it, forcing a stealthy approach.
Deus Ex Universe:
- Deus Ex has a level where JC Denton is captured, stripped of his gear, and must escape — which makes the Warren Spector quote ironic, as he was lead developer on the game. However, unlike many other games, you are immediately re-armed with a lot of good weapons and tools the moment you escape, making this much less of a pain, unless you rely too much on Assault Rifles or Shotguns. Because ammo has no mass or volume, despite taking away the player's heavily modified and upgraded rocket launcher, the bad guys were kind enough to leave JC the stack of twenty rockets sticking out of his pockets, meaning that more than likely the instant you FIND a weapon you'll have enough ammo to liberate several more. One nasty stumbling block is that if, when you finally reach the armoury that contains your own heavily-modded equipment, you have a standard weapon (such as one recovered from one of the guards) equipped, then picking up your modded item of the same type destroys that weapon, recovering only the ammo it was loaded with. If you've collected unmodded replacements for all your original weapons by the time you reach the armoury, it's entirely possible to do this to all your original gear, never even realising that it was your upgraded items in there at all, and have to start from scratch re-upgrading your items.
- "The Missing Link", a DLC chapter for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, takes Adam's gear and disables his augmentations at the start. You retain your basic abilities, including Adam's One-Hit KO takedowns, but you don't get your original gear back, since the chapter is stand-alone from the rest of the game. The Director's Cut downplays this: at the start of The Missing Link, you are depowered, lose all of your gear, and keep only your money, forcing you to make do with what you can grab. However, you are quickly directed to a stash that contains a small number of Praxis kits and all of your weapons — but no ammunition, and none of your grenades/mines or other items. At the end of the chapter, just before returning to the main story, you are given the opportunity to grab all of your original gear, and get enough Praxis points (combined with any you earned during the chapter) to bring you back up to your original level of ability. It also allows you to essentially respec, since you get the points, not your original abilities you had before.
Happens in Drakensang 2 at one point during the story. You can only count on stinky fish and eventually the weapons you can take from the guards.
In Fable, your character ends up in a prison cell with nothing but his undies. Thankfully, you get your equipment back about ten minutes later. Happens again in the sequel, though it's a bit more complicated the second time around.
In Final Fantasy XV, the enemy devises a way to strip Noctis of the ability that allows him (and, by extension, his teammates) to summon his weapons, effectively rendering him helpless. Subsequently separated from his friends, he has to wander the enemy stronghold while relying entirely on Arcana from the Ring of the Lucii, a unique magic moveset consisting of a slow Life Drain, an evasion-and-counter boost, and a Charged Attack One-Hit Kill. This magic was rather less-than-effective in the 1.0.0 version; later versions beefed the Arcana moveset and gave the player the option to follow his friends instead.
Kingdom Hearts:
- Late in Kingdom Hearts, during the first visit to Hollow Bastion, Sora loses the Keyblade to Riku and must fight through Hollow Bastion using only a toy wooden sword. This is eased, however, by having the Beast fighting alongside him. You can cast spells too, but that might not help so much if you're one of those who specialized in combat and since the Keyblade also enhances your magic, that ends up weakened as well. Thankfully, you get the Keyblade back once you catch up to Riku.
- Happens again in Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. Xion become unable to remember how to summon her Keyblade during a portion of the game, so in the last mission before she regains that power, Roxas lets her use his. When Xion points out that it means he doesn't have a weapon, he... improvises.
  Xion: Roxas, that's a stick.
- Again in Kingdom Hearts coded, when Maleficent breaks Data-Sora's Keyblade, to the point of it being a Mythology Gag now.
Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has this happen fairly early on, and you only have two fights sans-equipment before you get it back.
Mass Effect:
- Subverted in one case. When you first reach Noveria in the first game, the local security guards want to strip you of your weapons before you enter Port Hanshan. Just before you hand the guns over (or gun the security guards down), a voice over the intercom tells the guards to stop harassing you and let you pass.
- One of the DLC chapters in the second game plays it straight after the main character is captured. It only takes about a minute to get all your gear back though.
- Kasumi's loyalty mission also forces the player to solve a few puzzles and deal with a few weak enemies whilst equipped with only a pistol. Again, your weapons and armor are soon returned.
- The segment near the end of the second game where you play as Joker can count as this, as he's on a stealth mission with no equipment and can die easily.
- The Citadel DLC for the third game at one point drops you into a firefight with only a level one pistol you just stole from a goon and no armour, allies or medi-gel, which is pretty inconvenient after you fall quite a long distance and get beaten down to only one health box out of five as a scripted event. Of course, you still have all of your powers, which can be astoundingly destructive if you're a power-based class, and the pistol is really quite powerful if you aim for the head.
- Although by then there aren't very many enemies left to fight, the last leg of the third game's final dungeon has Shepard going it alone, no armor, and only a pistol. All other weapons are presumably destroyed or lost when Shepard is caught in an explosion prior to reaching the ship, which also reduces their armor to a charred mostly destroyed undershirt.
The Monster Hunter series has the occasional optional quest that you can only sign up for if you are not wearing any armor or talismans. You can still use your usual weapon, but with only food buffs, your weapon's defense if it even has any, and pouch items for defense, you become a Glass Cannon who can't afford to take any hits. Conversely, there are quests where you can bring your armor and talisman, but nothing in your item pouch. One notable quest of the former kind is "Naked and Afraid" in Monster Hunter 4, a High-Rank quest where you must fight two Deviljhos, already dangerous and aggressive monsters on their own, with no armor or Talismans. An example of the latter type occurs in the expansion Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate with "Misty Challenge", where you must slay or repel Chameleos (an Elder Dragon) without bringing any items in your inventory, thus relying on the food and potions provided by the guild in the camp area.
In Revenant, there is absolutely no indication that you should be leveling your "Hand Combat" skill, until you are stripped naked and set to fight the Ogrok Hand Combat champion.
Rune was billed as a game where manly Vikings, yetis, dwarves, and giant zombies chop each other to pieces with swords so huge they don't even fit on the screen. While most of the game easily lives up to this, your character is killed in a cutscene right after the tutorial, and then brought back to life in a dank underwater cavern with no weapons. You only get to do anything interesting after working your way through Underwater Ruins full of goblins, crabs, jellyfish and malignant sea anemones.
In Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys, you start out with the Cleria equipment from I and II, but you are stripped of it and thrown in the dungeon shortly after.

Adventure Game

Near the end of King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella, Rosella gets locked up and loses her gear, including the bow and arrow she'll need to use on Lolotte.
In the last act of Police Quest 4: Open Season, the Big Bad strips you of your possessions in a Flashlight Danger Revelation moment, forcing you to improvise an Aerosol Flamethrower to take him out.
Happens twice in the Quest for Glory series:
- The first is a brief encounter in Quest for Glory II. The Hero is arrested by Khaveen and stripped of all his gear. You then have a brief puzzle requiring you to escape your prison with only the clothes on your back (which conveniently includes a sapphire pin to help you earn the trust of your cellmate).
- The second is the beginning of Quest for Glory IV, when the Hero is teleported to Mordavia and stripped of all his belongings.
In Simon the Sorcerer, you lose all your inventory after getting shrunk. You won't get it back, but you no longer need it, anyway.
Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley: Right before the final level, Snufkin hurts his leg and has to be carried by Moomintroll through the park. As you're now playing as Moomintroll, you don't get to use any of Snufkin's instruments for this section.
Tales of Monkey Island: At one point in episode 1, you're strapped to a table and can't access your inventory, and are extremely limited in what you can interact with.

Driving Game

Jak X: Combat Racing has a late-game level where your vehicle has been sabotaged so you can't use any weapons, forcing you to rely on turbo boosts and pure driving skill alone to get a decent position. The bigger problem is more so that the weapon mechanics in this game revolve around allowing you to block opponents' weapons with your own, so not being able to use any makes you a sitting duck.
SpyHunter (2001) has a No Gear Level Section, the very first part of "German Blitz" starts you in one of the civilian vehicles. It's slow and has no weapons, and you have to use it to maneuver through the NOSTRA warehouse and get to your Weapons Van. Thankfully, this section is short, lasting less than a minute, and you're given back a fully loaded Interceptor to continue the mission with.

First-Person Shooter

Zig-zagged in Aliens: Colonial Marines. One level has Winter being captured and cocooned (but escaping before being facehugged), and losing all his weapons in the process. However, O'Neal somehow managed to save all of Winter's equipment in a duffle bag, and gives it back to him near the end of the level. Later on, after the Marine dropship crashs and destroy everything onboard, the player retains all their weapons, but they don't make a dent in the xenomorph queen (necessitating the usage of a cargo drop mechanism to push her out of a ship).
Aliens vs. Predator 2 does this to both the Marine and the Predator player characters. For the Marine, it happens pretty early in the game and is a rather standard scenario: knocked out by Dunya and sent to prison. You are helped by the fact that a fellow prisoner hands you a knife (well, you grab it off his barely cold body...) and the first enemy soldier posthumously donates you a pistol about six seconds after the mission starts. The Predator is trapped, shot unconscious with EMP weapons by Rykov and shipped off to the human base to be used as a scientific test subject. For obvious reasons, the scientists try to disarm their prisoners, but hesitate when taking off the arm blades of the first one induces cardiac arrest in the specimen (the Predators do not like being without a weapon). The Xenomorph player character, having no gear to speak of, avoids this treatment... or suffers it throughout their entire campaign, depending on one's perspective.
Area 51 (FPS) has you lose your weapons after losing your teammates and gaining the ability to turn into a mutant. You quickly regain them after getting partially cured. Not a big loss, considering that you only had three of the game's weapons prior to losing them (excluding the scanner).
BioShock:
- The original BioShock has Fontaine Fisheries, where Peach Wilkins won't let you advance unless you turn over all your weapons. You fight through the freezer area using only plasmids and a wrench, though you can find one or two dropped guns. Just to twist the knife, almost all of your meticulously saved ammo is "missing" when you do recover your weapons. That said, it is possible and in fact quite easy to cheat and bring a weapon in with you, as the gate that opens when you surrender your guns doesn't close again if you pick up another one and it's possible to carry items around with the telekinesis plasmid without collecting them.
- BioShock Infinite has a variant with Comstock House, where you technically get to keep your guns and powers, but on top of the level being a Stealth-Based Mission, there are zero ways to replenish your health and ammo — no vending machines, no containers to scrounge through, not even enemy drops. Most importantly is that Elizabeth — the lovable Hypercompetent Sidekick who can scrounge up such resources who you've gotten used to relying on in a pinch — is absent, and if you get caught, you will feel it. The worst part is that near the end of the level, the alarm gets unavoidably set off and you have to barrel through the ensuing brawl with minimal resources anyway.
This is a severe punishment in Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge, for apparently if you take anything from a certain cutscene that was not actually a scene from the movie, a group of children will warn you to put it back. If you choose to deny their demand, they strip you of your entire inventory, thus rendering the game Unwinnable. Justified (in a sense) — if you listen to the dialogue in the scene, those items are stolen goods. (The only exception is the newspaper, which you are not punished for taking, but which can be found in a different scene anyway.)
Call of Duty:
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has "Hunted", where the player's chopper gets shot down on the way back from the "Blackout" level and you start out with only a pistol and your choice of some regular assault rifles and/or an SMG, rather than the extensively-modified assault rifle with grenade launcher and silenced sniper rifle you had for the previous level.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has one of the most intense levels of the game, when Soap, Ghost, and Roach fight their way through a Favela. Near the end of the level, your squad requires you evacuate. Cue running across rooftops. Of course, you miss a gap, fall off a ledge, and black out. You don't have time to reclaim your weapons, so you run half a mile through a massive slum to get back to the rooftops without the weapons you were kicking ass with earlier, with an entire militia on your tail, and make a breakneck jump to "get to the chopper", with a final leap that pays homage to the original daring escape made by Soap in Call of Duty 4 on the cargo rig.
- Call of Duty: Ghosts features several instances in which the player is left with at most a pistol and must either hide or take weapons from enemy troops:
  - The very first level is technically a no gear level, as the player is at this point in the game a civilian fleeing the attack on his hometown.
  - One segment of "Federation Day" has the player character lose his weapons after falling from a collapsing building, leaving him only with his knife.
  - After Rorke escapes capture, the player is left to sneak past enemy patrols, armed only with a silenced pistol.
  - The player again is left only with a pistol after being captured by Rorke. Subverted in this instance, however, as not only does the player have two highly competent AI allies, but also almost immediately has access to a rack of assault and sniper rifles — he or she even has a choice of preferred optic.
Command & Conquer: Renegade, captured by stealth soldiers. However, in this case, you never get back the weapons taken from you, and have to rebuild your arsenal from almost scratch, save your pistol. Also interestingly, as soon as you rescue any given prisoner, they automatically get a gatling gun from seemingly nowhere. You never recover your reliable, accurate assault rifle either.
In The Conduit, you can finish a level armed to the max with your favorite weapons — including rare super-weapons with One-Hit Kill capability — and then lose them all when you transition to the next level.
In the true final level of Cruelty Squad, Trauma Loop, all of your implants are disabled. You can regain the use of them by finding an NPC called the Limit Chancellor and killing him.
Crysis has this, using Cutscene Incompetence in that you get ambushed in a way that a real person never would; but it simultaneously invokes Cutscene Power to the Max by letting you survive damage that a real person couldn't.
Dark Forces Saga:
- Dark Forces: Kyle Katarn gets captured by Jabba the Hutt's henchmen and dropped into a pit with at least one kell dragon. Fortunately, he can dodge its attacks and kill it with enough hits from his fists.
- Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II: Again in the Expansion Pack Mysteries of the Sith after a bad case of Cutscene Incompetence Mara Jade is captured and thrown into a Hutt's dungeon. Force on her side, she easily escapes, but has to wrestle a Rancor in the process. Additionally, in the last level none of your weapons except for your lightsaber even work.
- Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast: Subverted; you have your main weapons confiscated upon entering a bar in one level, but are otherwise unrestricted and get to keep your lightsaber. Since it's the first level where you have the saber, it could be seen as a way of forcing the player to start relying on the saber rather than guns.
- Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy: There is a level in which the player is captured and stripped of all weapons and then has to escape. Gathering weapons is not difficult, as there are plenty lying around, but the player is denied one of the most powerful weapons in the game — the lightsaber. This is deliberate on the part of Jaden's captor, who's created a blood sport out of letting dangerous prisoners try to escape while he hunts them down. Of course, he's never hunted a Jedi before, and doesn't consider finding a way to take away the other most powerful set of weapons in the game: Jaden's force powers. This makes for a challenging stealth section for a character who invested in light-side force powers and so relied exclusively on their guns and saber for damage, and a laughably easy slaughterfest for a dark-side adept. One of the simplest and most cathartic strategies when you face the guy is to Force Push the shots of his concussion rifle right back into his face.
The Darkness II has a late level where Jackie loses the titular quasi-demonic power and has to rely on ordinary weapons to clear a cellar full of baddies.
After the Cabal overlord Ghaul cuts off the Guardian's Light in Destiny 2 and hurled them to earth from his ship, you were left with next to no health, broken down armor, a damaged SMG and sidearm, and worst of all, none of the Guardian powers you are accustomed to (especially wrenching if you're a veteran of the first game). You had to survive with only these against Cabal warbeasts and troopers as you made your way to the refuge of the Farm. Hell, you couldn't even jump. (Since this is now "vaulted" content, it's not playable, unfortunately.)
In Doom³, shortly after deciding whether to call the fleet or not, the main character is teleported to Hell and loses all his weapons. Then you're fighting the big monsters you've been saving rocket shells for with a shotgun and dead ends. When you return to Mars, you lose your weapons again (except for the Soul Cube), but thankfully, you reacquire most of your arsenal right at the start of your return.
Duke Nukem 3D, captured by Pig Cops. After the second level. And if one isn't paying attention, they'll die instantly at the start of the next level: the pigs are going to electrocute Duke via electric chair!
Earthless: Prelude, a Doom II mod, makes some levels end with Doomguy inevitably die right before their conclusion. While this is done for the sake of Fission Mailed (as progression continues normally), it has the side effect of having the main character start the next level with just a pistol, a knife and the original caps for the health and ammunition.
Far Cry:
- Far Cry:
  - Used in an uncommonly logical manner: You actually start the game unarmed after a shipwreck, and spend the first level seeking out weapons and armor before actually taking on the people who shipwrecked you. A more typical example occurs later, toward the end, when you lose everything after getting captured.
  - Instincts does this three times, though logically; the first time, you're crawling out of a shipwreck with only your switchblade, while the second time you've been captured, and the third time you've just woken up from surgery to find you've beaten fifty men to death with your bare hands and all hell has broken loose.
- Far Cry 2 has essentially no connection to the previous game, but in one level you and your main buddy are captured and taken to a prison. Oddly enough they leave your machete on you but take your guns, but there's very little fighting in the prison itself; it's a short run straight out of the cells past no guards to get outside, and from there you can sneak up on a hut on the road and steal some supplies. As soon as you get out of the prison you're able to get to a gun dealer and totally restock.
- Also happens in Far Cry 3, when you get captured, twice in a row. The first time, you find a basic gun pretty quickly, and it's all you need to escape. The second time, you still have your machete, and are able to kill a guard quickly to get his gun, but it's not terribly useful, since the gun is neither silenced (so no easy stealth kills from range) nor powerful enough to adequately deal with the Heavy Trooper guarding the shack with your supplies.
- After starting Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon with the upgraded versions of the game's weapons, you're stripped of them all and forced to sneak past a herd of the titular Blood Dragons, either to emphasize how "unstoppable" they are or just to scare the crap out of the player.
- Far Cry 4 has Durgesh Prison. Not only are you stripped of your gear but you're also doped out of your gourd on hallucinogenic drugs which make you see a big monster thing that can in fact kill you. It's worn off by the time you've scrounged to build a grappling hook and descended the cliff, but now you have to deal with armed guards until you escape the area.
- Far Cry 5 does this to an annoying extent, as there are numerous unavoidable scripted events where you're automatically captured and have your gear taken away. While you can instantly regain all your weapons for free once you make it to a weapon shop, your ammo is permanently lost, forcing you to scrounge or buy more, which is annoying when it comes to expensive types like rockets and .50 caliber rounds.
First Encounter Assault Recon:
- In F.E.A.R., several psychic vision sequences in the final Interval inexplicably make all of Point Man's weapons vanish and equip him with a pistol.
- F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin strips Becket of his gear after the first level, as he is critically injured by the nuclear explosion (from the first game) and taken to Armacham's hospital where he later wakes up.
- In F.E.A.R. 3, Point Man manages to lose his entire inventory at the beginning of every single level. In the later levels he at least starts out armed, but often only with a basic pistol and submachine gun at most. An attempt is made to justify this by having nearly every level begin with Point Man recovering from some destructive event, such as a helicopter crash, a flood, falling off a bridge, etc., in which he'd naturally lose much of his gear.
Half-Life:
- In the first Half-Life, a pair of Mooks who want revenge for you "killing their buddies" (never mind that they started it) dump you in a trash compactor, taking away all your weapons and collected ammo in the process.
- When infiltrating the Citadel in Half-Life 2, you're stripped of all weapons except for the gravity gun, which gets upgraded.
In Halo: Reach, after falling from orbit, Noble Six begins the Exodus mission with half-health and only a Magnum, and ammo for that and other weapons is hard to come by.
James Bond:
- This happens twice in GoldenEye (1997), and both of them are Escort Missions. In the first one, you have the option of leaving Natalya in her cell until you've cleared out the rest of the base.
- In Agent Under Fire, you can actually prevent this from happening, if you find a keycard before you enter the submarine in the Poseidon level.
Marathon has its fair share of this. It happens over five times when combining all three games. As Jason Jones once said, "ah, grasshopper, the most accessible weapon of all is your own fists, you must learn to lay aside your weapons of steel and use your flesh." He said in response to some people saying how it was impossible to do a couple levels in the first game Vidmaster-style as there were no weapon pickups in those level, and Vidmaster-style means starting with level select (which means nothing but the pistol plus a couple clips for it and your fists that you start with). There is one level which could not be completed using level select unless using mods, though, as getting out of the first room required triggering a switch remotely, and the pistol can't do that.
Medal of Honor:
- Frontline has two levels which start you off with nothing but a pistol. Luckily, in the latter (Clipping Their Wings), there's a stash of heavy weapons, which you'll definitely need.
- In the middle level of Allied Assault's "Behind Enemy Lines" mission, you start with only a silenced pistol, and have to infiltrate a tank encampment by stowing away on an enemy truck (unless you prefer the hard way). Luckily, there's a Kar 98 sniper rifle just after this part, and plenty of SMG's and ammo.
Perfect Dark:
- You must sneak into an air base to infiltrate Air Force One, and on higher difficulties, one of the objectives forces you to drop off all your weapons at the baggage check so you can get through security without your disguise being compromised. It doesn't become a problem until you deactivate the security system so they're not detected, because that's when the NSA agents decide to spring their plan and shoot up the place.
- One of the later levels has you held prisoner on an alien starship. After waking up, you realize that the only weapons you have are a throwing knife and your fists. Strangely enough, this is one of two levels that not only doesn't require, but doesn't allow, some degree of stealth. It's not much of a hassle to collect another weapon though, since you can disarm the aliens and take their blaster pistol. Be careful, though: Using all of your ammunition before destroying the computer terminals immediately fails the mission.
- The virtual deathmatch in Perfect Dark Zero starts you off with only a MagSec4 pistol, while Mai Hem is armed with a Superdragon assault rifle. Fortunately, if you activated the satellite dish earlier, Chandra can hack the game and send you an M-60 machine gun.
Postal 2:
- This occurs when not only are you knocked out and kidnapped, but you wake up dressed in a Gimp suit. After escaping and getting your weapons back, you then have to go to the laundromat to change back to your regular clothes.
- An optional version in the police department, if you gain notoriety with the police and allow them to arrest you. They take away everything except for your box of matches. It's possible to regain everything you had beforehand.
Quake IV has a level where you're captured by the Strogg, stripped of your weapons, and turned into one of them (called Stroggification). However, you quickly regain many of your weapons throughout the level.
After finding your target underneath the Train Yard in Rainbow Six: Vegas, hidden bombs blow up and bury you under a pile of rock, while your teammates are captured. Your primary weapons, grenades, equipment, and enhanced optics are all taken from you, forcing you to go through the level with only your pistol (and anything you can scavenge from the enemy, mostly shotguns). Hope you picked a good sidearm all the way back at the last ammo crate half an hour ago.
Happens three times in Red Faction. In all three cases, you are able to rebuild your arsenal the same way you built it in the first place (taking guns off dead enemies), but whatever weapons and ammo you had originally are lost. On the plus side, one of these sequences can be skipped — just ignore Hendrix's insistence that you need a disguise in the hospital.
This happens three-fifths of the way through Resistance 3, after Joseph Capelli is captured by the Wardens. Interestingly, you start with getting two new weapons before you ever recover the old ones: The Sledgehammer and the Mutator, and the returning weapons you do get at first are the rather low-tech ones; the Carbine and the Magnum, for example. The most interesting part, however, is that you don't actually end up recovering all of your weapons by the end of the level, and you'll arrive at the next only to check your quick select and realize that they still aren't there. Fortunately, you recover them fairly quickly after this.
Serious Sam does this constantly. In The First Encounter, it's actually a variation: at the end of one level, most of your ammo is dropped during a long trek to make the travel easier (Sam only keeps shotgun shells), but your weapons still remain. In The Second Encounter and Serious Sam II, Sam loses weapons after every chapter due to teleportation restrictions. In the last chapter of Serious Sam II, you'll lose your weapons by being captured. In Serious Sam 3: BFE, you lose all your weapons in a helicopter crash at one point.
In SiN (1998), John Blade is mutated into a monster right after one of the later stages, and spends a whole level (plus an optional Secret Level) running through dangerous and deadly test chambers before being turned back into a human, which immediately reverts him back to his human form — along with all his weapons, ammo and special items returning (with no explanation of where they were in the interim).
Soldier of Fortune II:
- Mullins is stripped of his weapons and imprisoned by the Triads in Hong Kong.
- He later starts with no weapons in the hospital in New York, and only gets a weapon from his fallen partner when Prometheus attacks.
Team Fortress 2:
- In the "Sudden Death" mode, triggered when a match ends in a stalemate, all classes of both teams are forced to use their (in almost all cases quite damaging) melee weapons. This originated as a custom game modifier that Valve applied across the board.
- One of the "Roll the Dice" results leaves you with only the use of your Melee weapons and nothing else. A slap on the wrist if you're next to your spawn, a death sentence for any spy behind enemy lines now left with only his knife (but no disguise kit or cloak watch).
TimeShift: The second level, where you gain your timeshifting powers, has you start unarmed. Likewise, the final level of the game has the player start unarmed.
Subverted in Titanfall 2. Jack has captured and BT wrecked; fortunately, however, Jack's mentor had the foresight to stow a SERE^noteSearch, Evade, Rescue, Escape kit in BT's optical unit, which also happens to house his AI. The SERE kit includes a Smart Pistol (which had been conspicuously absent for the entire game), which allows you to gun down entire squads of grunts without so much as slowing down. At the end of the sequence, a spare chassis is dropped down for BT to be installed into, which already has all the Titan Kits you've collected over the course of the game, as well as the Legion loadout.
Happens fairly early in TRON 2.0. Particularly irritating in that one of the weapons you lose costs energy to acquire in the first place — energy which might have been better spent elsewhere — and upon losing it you cannot retrieve it (you do eventually get your frisbee back, though, and are also given a new weapon to make up for it). There are several infinite (and, until you leave the level, infinitely reusable) energy sources between the time you acquire the weapon and the time you are relieved of it.
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty strips you of your guns and ammo at the end of each level and replaces them with 1 or 2 preset guns (often not very good).
Vanguard, a Doom II mod, has the player die at the end of level 5, forcing him to go through level 6 (aptly named "Punchline") with nothing but a pistol and a berserk fist. All these imps and zombiemen suddenly become a real threat, and the moment where you get the shotgun back gives you the "yeah, I'm back in the game!" feeling.
Wolfenstein:
- Some of the mods for Wolfenstein 3-D have individual levels where you start off without weapons.
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein begins this way. The Xbox version adds an extra chapter before the opening, which makes it more of this trope when you're thrown in prison without your weapons.
- Shows up again in Wolfenstein: The Old Blood; first, when BJ is once again captured and has to escape from the titular castle — this time beginning only with some lengths of pipe, and later in the game where a Zombie Apocalypse occurs, and you only have a pipe because you had to stash your weapons to sneak into a tavern filled with Nazis in the previous level. In the second example, you can get your weapons back.
XIII: In a particularly creepy instance of the trope, you must escape from an insane asylum.

Massively Multiplayer Online RPG

In City of Heroes and City of Villains, this is essentially the entire purpose of the Exemplar/Malefactor (Cross-level team) and Flashback (repeating a quest) features. The game doesn't make extensive use of in-game items, but you receive an effective level reduction, losing access to any abilities and enhancements you achieved after the level you've been reduced to.
Salvage in Final Fantasy XI strips players of the ability to use all gear upon entering (the excuse is something about psychowaves in the ruins). Special cells dropped by enemies can be used to lift the equipment restrictions, slot by slot. Several bosses also have abilities which strip the players gear when hit with them. Virtually any serious player uses extensive macro'ed gear swaps to maximize the effect of every action they take, so it's generally not an issue to instantly reequip everything with the click one a single macro. Players without such macros however have an ordeal of trying to reequip everything mid combat through the clunky aged UI only to find themselves striped again.
Kingdom of Loathing:
- The idea behind the Kung Fu Hustler skill is to turn the character with it into a Bare-Fisted Monk: if you have it and don't have any weapons equipped, you get four intrinsic effects that boost your power by a considerable amount. If you equip weapons (or off-hand items which aren't weapons), you lose the effects at the start of your next combat.
- Also used in one of the game's Self-Imposed Challenge paths, "Way of the Surprising Fist", which gives you the opportunity to learn some powerful martial-arts moves but prevents you from using weapons or off-hand items. In fact, you can get a trophy for acquiring both Kung Fu Hustler and Master of the Surprising Fist as permanent skills.
- In Hobopolis, one of the multiplayer dungeons, the boss Zombo has the ability to literally scare your pants, hat and shirt off. Additionally, leaving him alive for the Hodgman the Hoboverlord fight, the Final Boss of Hobopolis, will cause Zombo to scare your gear off during his battle.
In The Secret World, you can't just have your gear taken from you; stuff made for you will respawn in your possession the way you yourself do. But there are ways to disable most of your supernatural abilities within an area, rendering it all inaccessible. This is one of the ways the game (which has no explicit stealth powers) implements a Stealth-Based Mission. There's even one mission which requires combat without gear. Fortunately, it turns out that among the many hidden triggers implanted in your mind (usually used to explain your differing abilities in cutscenes) includes one for this which loads up a set of boxing- and jujitsu- based skills, backed by the slight physical augmentation you still possess... and the Big Bad of the arc was smart enough to disarm his normally lethally-equipped security force (the point is to keep you locked down; kill you and you could respawn anywhere). The whole thing naturally culminates in a Fisticuffs Boss.
In Temtem, the Player Character crash-lands on the Death World of Tucma, losing their key items. Shortly afterward, they're arrested upon first entering the Underground City of Quetzal due to a Frame-Up, with their Mons and gear confiscated. You then have to fight your way through the surrounding mines with a donated party.

Mecha Game

In Zone of the Enders, you have to play a mission as a damaged mook Raptor with a limited repertoire.

Platform Game

Level 4-1 of A Boy and His Blob begins with Blob, the source of all your abilities, getting suddenly kidnapped. You have to make your way through the whole level without him.
Cave Story plays with this one. You get captured by the Doctor's minions in the Plantation, so you'd expect them to confiscate your gear — but instead, you wake up inside a cell with all your weapons and equipment. Shortly after, in the Final Cave (both versions) and in the Sacred Grounds, you get to keep your weapons, but they're forcibly deleveled to their weakest state. "You feel a black wind pass through you. All weapons dropped to level 1!"
The second level of Gamer 2 begins with Hailey tripping and losing her deflector plate. Since she hasn't obtained any weapons yet, she's forced to sneak her way through a building full of zombies as a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
This is the main mechanic of Goodboy Galaxy. Each stage begins in a central room with a set of gates that will remove an ability from your moveset such as the high jump, the regenerating shield and even the laser gun. Players are required to work with those limitations to find their way back from various routes, meeting characters and acquiring key items along the way. Your moveset will likewise be incomplete during boss fights, sometimes requiring puzzles to be solved mid-battle to survive them without a weapon.
Happens twice in Heart of Darkness. When you start the game, you have the electric equivalent of a flamethrower with which you zap hordes of shadowy monsters. You lose that weapon before the end of the first level, and since you're playing a twelve-year-old boy with no other means of defense, you have to run helplessly for the rest of the level. Later in the game, you find a magical rock that grants you powers, and you can start zapping monsters again. This lasts until the rock is destroyed late in the game, and you lose your powers for good, only to find your electric weapon a moment later.
Iji has a case that applies to an entire difficulty level. Ultimortal difficulty, as part of restricting stat upgrades to Health solely, forbids using anything other than the "basic" weapons: the Shotgun, Resonance Detonator (which is effectively useless in Ultimortal), and Resonance Reflector.
In Kirby's Return to Dream Land, when Kirby enters the other dimension through the openings unlocked from using the Super Abilities, he loses his ability and must make his way through an obstacle course with only his normal moves.
Just before the boss fight in Rabi-Ribi against Miru, Ribbon is knocked out, robbing the player of all their magic abilities (which means the majority of their ranged options) and forcing them to just use physical attacks.
Shantae and the Pirate's Curse:
- The first time at Tan Line Temple, Shantae is mistaken as their princess and was changed into a skimpy princess outfit and her items were taken away. Escaping from the cell is easy enough but getting spotted by the large armored guards forces you back to the cell and start over again^note; even picking up new items during the level won't let you use them. It is very frustrating for some speed runners.
- The "Run Run Rottytops!" sequence that occurs during the first visit to Spiderweb Island takes this trope to its logical conclusion: you are completely and entirely defenseless, turning the level into an obstacle course.
Sonic Superstars: Act 2 of Golden Capital sees Fang the Hunter abscond with all of the Chaos Emeralds you've collected, leaving you without your Emerald Powers. Thankfully, you get them back after completing the Zone.
Super Mario Bros.:
- The parts in Super Mario Sunshine where you lose FLUDD, namely the special obstacle courses and "The Goopy Inferno", the third episode of Pianta Village. The FLUDD is a water device that lets Mario spray enemies to stun them or allow Mario to hover and clear gaps. When you don't have the item, you have to rely on precise jumping to get to each platform and have to use other moves to stomp enemies. You only lose use of FLUDD once while traversing the obstacle courses until it is completed, whereas in the third episode of Pianta Village, FLUDD is always stolen from you as you begin the mission and you have to make your way through the goop to get it back.
- Certain challenges in Super Mario Odyssey require Mario to deposit Cappy atop a scarecrow to access the area, thus requring Mario to complete the challenges without the extra abilities and mobility from Cappy's help.
- After Dimentio kills Mario in Super Paper Mario he winds up in a different dimension called the Underwhere without Peach, Bowser, any of the Pixls, or any of his items. Mario has to seek the help of Queen Jaydes to return to the real world.
- World 3-7 of Paper Mario: Sticker Star seperates you from Kersti, your Hammer, and all of your stickers upon falling in a pit of spiders. You must reclaim all of your Stickers, beat a miniboss without the Hammer, save Kersti, find the Hammer, save the Wiggler segment that fell down the hole, then finally reach the goal.
- In Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, the Mario Bros are sent to jail, and Hammer Bros confiscate all of their stuff. You're left with no attacks, and nothing to do but idle. However, you can recover your Command Blocks one at a time by beating up the Hammer Bros.

Real-Time Strategy

Halo Wars 2 has the level "One Three Zero", where you start with just Alice-130, and must free imprisoned friendly units. The player has no base and limited supplies, so whatever supplies you find are all the supplies you'll get.
Warcraft III:
- The Blood Elf campaign has a level where you start with just Kael and Vash, freeing your imprisoned elf soldiers. Most are actually locked up without arms or armor (and use the civilian elf models to reflect this), but as soon as they're rescued run over to a rack to regain their weapons, armor, and magic powers.
- In the second act of the Orc Campaign, Rexxar goes through a No Gear Fight, during which he has to fight the Ogre Chieftain Kor'gall solo without the use of any of his items (and the stat boosts they impart). Fortunately, he still has his Summon Magic and whatever magic runes are lying around the arena, but Kor'gall's more versatile array of spells will make it a difficult fight indeed.

Roguelike

Ancient Domains of Mystery twists this by making the player voluntarily give up his equipment. Just hanging inside the Tower of Eternal Flames, fire immunity or no, will randomly and permanently destroy things from your inventory (with fireproof blankets/rings of ice as a partial countermeasure). Falling down the Rift breaks a good portion of your currently carried inventory and the only way to diminish the effect is to have the few good/not too awful corruption effects among an array of nasty ones. On both occasions the smart player is forced to stash most of their rarer belongings somewhere and having to get by with only the bare essentials. Using artifact weapons/armor is an option due to their indestructible nature, but they also accelerate the player's food consumption, making starvation a real possibility.
The Binding of Isaac has a subarea in the Mines/Ashpit II that removes everything from your character except your health and any plot-relevant items when you enter it. At the end of the area is Knife Piece 2, which you need to access the Corpse. Once you pick up the Knife Piece, it's time to run, because an invulnerable Advancing Boss of Doom spawns and you'll have to backtrack through a long maze-like area to escape. Of course, any characters that can fly by default can make a straight line for the exit, since their flying doesn't count as gear.
In Chocobo's Dungeon, all of the special dungeons prevent you from bringing in items including gear from outside; upon entering, your inventory is put into your storage (if there isn't enough room in storage, you can't enter). Upon leaving the dungeon you get to keep everything you found inside and can go to storage to retrieve your former gear as well.
The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series regularly features dungeons which either bring you back to level 1, take away all your items, force you to enter without companions, or all three of the above.

Role-Playing Game

In Anachronox, before fighting against the comic-book villain Rictus, he steals your mystech (magic-generating devices), limiting your options for the fight. Once you defeat him, Sly is ecstatic about becoming the new owner of the ginormous ship... and then remembering the twist ending of one of his comic books. Cue sudden revival, a beatdown, and the whole team being marched into the holding cells with all the other prisoners.
In Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, going into the Bonus Dungeon sets your level to one (temporarily, thankfully); it doesn't take your equipment, though, and it can be circumvented with Party XP, which can be applied at will (and isn't restricted in said bonus dungeon).
Bug Fables: After Team Snakemouth is kidnapped by bandits in Chapter 4, the bandits steal all the items you have in your inventory, as well as Vi's Beemerang. The player then must make their way past the bandits to find the treasure chest where all of the party's equipment is contained.
Chrono Trigger has one of these, along with an earlier imprisonment that for some reason didn't dequip you. In the latter case, you indeed lose all your weapons (and all other items) and have to avoid the guards until you get them back, since your characters can't even defend themselves without a weapon equipped. Apparently, you can't cast magic or use tonics without a sword or gun. On the other hand, if your active party includes the Badass Normal cavewoman who laughs at such silly ideas as weapons, she can go to town on them from the get-go.
Happens repeatedly in A Dance with Rogues. It's mostly an excuse to have your character run around naked, though.
At one point in Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, you may get drugged, lose all your possessions and be sold into slavery. Of course, you can still fight with fists, spells/psionics and Thri-Kreen poison. When you reach the trader who drugged you, you get your possessions back.
Divine Divinity has a segment when you're captured by The Dragon, stripped of your equipment, and thrown into prison. Fortunately, a (shapeshifted) cat comes to your rescue, and you'll be able to get your equipment back right after.
In Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening, the entire party has to fight clones of themselves wearing their equipment in order to escape, and the main character's gear is recovered last. With a bit of Sequence Breaking (i.e. unequipping all your gear before entering that dungeon—your inventory is not taken away, just your current gear), it can result in you getting free high-level gear, which the clones use in place of weapons that you were supposed to carry.
The Elder Scrolls:
- Almost all prisons throughout the series function as these, though you're usually given a single lockpick.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  - The "No One Escapes Cidhna Mine" sidequest, which strips you of all your inventory items (though magic is still available, you're given a pickaxe, and you can bargain with your fellow inmates for a shiv). Your stuff is all given back to you at the very end, however.
  - Averted in the main quest when you must infiltrate the Thalmor embassy. A collaborator can smuggle some equipment in for you, and instructs you to bring only what is absolutely necessary, but there's no weight limit on what he smuggles in, so you can dump your entire inventory on him and pick it up again ten minutes later without ever having to get into a fight.
  - Mastering the ultimate Restoration spell requires performing a ritual in which the player character is locked in a small room, stripped of all their gear and clothes, and must survive long enough being attacked by mage ghosts, or outright defeat them.
Fallout:
- Fallout 3:
  - Subverted. Despite losing all your inventory (including your Pip-Boy) when captured after getting a key plot item, you recover all your items from a locker conveniently placed in the room you are held in. You're even instructed by one of your captors (President Eden) to get your stuff from it. The sequence following this event, had it NOT be subverted, would've been a subversion of another fake difficulty trope (before briefly subverting/correcting itself.) Played arrow-straight, however, in The Pitt expansion. In order to get into Pittsburgh, you must (willingly or unwillingly) give up all your equipment except, optionally, for a hidden switchblade or the least powerful gun in the game — both are only marginally better than your bare hands despite the fact that by this point, you may be kitted out in full Power Armor with a Gatling Laser and the guards are about as strong as the other random Mooks you've been killing for days.
  - Same deal for the Mothership Zeta expansion. Although you find some really swanky stun sticks almost immediately, and then start finding alien zap guns. It's almost enough to make you not want to bother retrieving the rest of your stuff.
  - Also played straight in the Operation: Anchorage simulation, which starts you off with only a Silenced 10mm Pistol against virtual Chinese soldiers with assault and sniper rifles, and this time, you can't loot enemy weapons either.
- Fallout: New Vegas has several of these areas:
  - In the main game, there are several areas with doormen that will confiscate your weapons before letting you inside (such as casinos on the New Vegas Strip or Caesar's Fort) and hold onto them until you leave. That said, you can smuggle in small holdout weapons (like straight razors, brass knuckles, or small pistols) or large holdout weapons if your sneaking skill is especially good (like large pistols or energy weapons.) Or you can tell the doormen something along the lines of:
    The Courier: Five Words. From. My. Cold. Dead. Hands.
  - Note that saying that is a bad idea if you want to interact with the folks there in a way not involving gunfire.
  - In the Dead Money expansion, you lose all your gear from the start with the Hand Wave that the Sierra Madre automated security system removes everything with traces of radiation on it and teleports it back to your home. (Oddly enough, this does not include your Pip-Boy.)
  - In the Honest Hearts expansion there's a more reasonable explanation - since you're joining a caravan that will travel through mountainous terrain, you can only carry 75 pounds of gear with you to keep up. (You do get to choose which gear to take with you, however. Also, if you pass a few checks, you can get someone else to carry an additional 25 pounds of gear for you.)
  - During the first leg of the quest "Still in the Dark" (unless you have Veronica as a companion), the Brotherhood of Steel strips you of your inventory as well as fitting you with an explosive collar, and only gives you your stuff back after you're back outside of the bunker, moving to deal with an NCR Ranger who's snooping too close.
Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy VI:
  - When you first find Terra in the World of Ruin, a monster called Humbaba (Phunbaba in the SNES localization) attacks the all-child village she cares for. She tries fighting him off with no weapons or armor equipped and promptly gets laid out on the ground, leaving your party to come to the rescue.
  - The Cultists' Tower strips your party of every ability except for Esper-derived magic and summoning. You are expected to engage in magic duels with the enemies in the tower, which often entails bouncing spells off of party members equipped with Reflect Rings. An exception is Umaro the yeti, who does not possess the Attack command and is an entirely AI-controlled berserker. He will continue to pummel the enemies in the tower the same as he does everywhere else.
- In Final Fantasy VII, Yuffie steals all of your materia once you start the Wutai sidequest. (If you have a LOT of materia, she'll actually leave a few, but you're not likely to have enough at the point when the sidequest first opens unless you spent a lot of time grinding.) This is extremely devastating since materia not only gives you your abilities, but it also alters your stats. Without materia, your party is severely gimped, even with the best weapons and armor. To rub the salt in the wound, any materia you find during the side quest is immediately stolen by Yuffie on the spot. To make sure the player isn't completely screwed, enemies in the area will always drop X-Potions (fully restores HP) and attack items like Bolt Plumes so that the player can at least heal and hit multiple enemies and exploit their elemental weaknesses.
- Final Fantasy VIII
  - At the beginning of Disc 2, your characters are captured and thrown in prison with all their weapons taken from them. Not really a problem since one of your characters doesn't use weapons. So it's up to him to go alone through the prison to find the weapons (conveniently left in a pile where he can get them easily).
  - When you enter the final boss's castle, all your combat-menu commands are sealed off, with the exception of standard physical attacks. To regain use of them in the castle, the heroes must win several lesser boss battles, with each victory unlocking a combat command of the player's choice.
  - A stat variation with the final boss, who can "blow" away the party's junctions, effectively lowering stats to miniscule amounts. Given the way magic junctioning works in this game, it is actually the most terrifying thing the boss can do.
- In Final Fantasy XII, you're thrown in jail at one point and stripped of your equipment, but still get to keep all the spells and techniques you've acquired so far.
- In World of Final Fantasy, as part of a ploy by the League of S, your two playable characters are imprisoned in the D-District Prison from Final Fantasy VIII, which is located underneath Fiagro Castle from Final Fantasy VI and which leads into a mako reactor from Final Fantasy VII. However, as part of the ploy to make it look as real as possible, they're restrained with devices that completely strip away their normal ability to use mirages, or any of the abilities associated with them. Mercifully the prison is filled with the first robotic Mirages you encounter and it's at this point you're given your first Eldboxes that let you capture them. You may not have your normal team, but you don't have to go it alone for more than a couple fights.
In the prologue of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC, Estelle and Anelace get captured by Jaegers (mercenaries) and wake up in the middle of a forest with all their equipment gone. You get your stuff back in chests scattered through the dungeon, but for once, this actually makes sense in-universe: the whole thing turns out to be an elaborate training exercise.
Lunar: The Silver Star has the Crystal Tower dungeon, in which only the Dragonmaster may wield weapons due to a spell. Since no one in your party is a Dragonmaster, you have to rely on your fists and magic to defeat the various monsters within.
Early on in Mega Man Battle Network 3: White and Blue, Mega Man's transmission program (the program that keeps the connection between him and Lan's PET) breaks, having been damaged by Flash Man's Shining Browser Crasher. This removes Mega Man's ability to jack out, making it necessary for him to run back to the jack-in point to get back into the PET. It also removes the possibility for Lan to send Battle Chip data to Mega Man, leaving him with his Mega Buster to defend himself.
Might and Magic:
- VII has you travelling to the game's final dungeon requires a brief trek through shark-infested waters while nothing but a wetsuit and a laser blaster. You can't cast any spells, either. You at least get to carry all of your armor with you, so that it can put back on just as quickly as it was taken off once you get there (which, in turn, renders the whole experience little more than a maddening exercise in completely removing everybody's equipment and then putting it right back on).
- X's sole DLC starts off after the original game ends with the party getting arrested and thrown in a jail. The first part of it is about maneuvering to avoid guards so you can find some simple replacement gear and be able to actually fight them. Later on, it is possible to get your original gear back — it's technically optional, but you really should, as there is no second chance to get it back once you leave the prison.
Mother 3:
- When Duster is first introduced as a party member helping Flint climb the mountain, he is dragged from his home, sleeping all the way, by Boney to the mountains before he actually wakes up and thus has none of his thief's tools save for the Wall Staples since they were left behind in his home.
- Late in the game, you lose your entire inventory in an undersea whirlpool after a boss that just can't accept defeat. Your entire party washes up on shore with only 1 HP each, 0 PP, and whatever was equipped during the battle. A monster blocks the way and will annihilate your party in their current state. In their desperation, they resort to eating mushrooms growing near where they washed up, with predictable results. (You do get your stuff back on the other side of the jungle, though, after meeting a friendly octopus.)
Nethergate has the three Crones do this to you if you're playing a party of Celts. You do get your equipment back after escaping their maze, and it's not especially difficult. However, it takes But Thou Must! to infuriating levels, since you can't get across a certain bridge to progress the plot until you go through this sequence.
Neverwinter Nights: The beginning of the expansion Hordes of the Underdark does this. Not terribly annoying if you start a new character for it, but if you use a character that you used in the original campaign you lose all the gear it had for most of the first chapter. One good part of the expansion is the zero-magic area of the Beholder Caverns: all of the magical equipment and potions and scrolls and everything else you never realised your epic-level character relied on are reduced to its nonmagical equivalent. This includes the enhancement bonuses and healing items. And what do they throw at you? Level 3 to 5 Goddamned Bats. (Actually, non-demonic spiders, but still...) It's a refreshingly, unexpectedly NOT-scrappy level... unless you're a caster, but at that point, you're on the quadratic end of the equation anyway.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star: One of the levels in World 3 of this game, called Rustle Burrow, has Mario falling into a hole where he loses all of his possessions. This includes all of his stickers, his hammer, and even his traveling companion Kersti forcing him not to use the Battle Spinner. As Mario ventures through the level, he can find each of his stickers along the way and will eventually find Kersti and his hammer near the end of the level. However, this turns Rustle Burrow into a pretty nasty That One Level considering right before Mario can go any further into the burrow, he confronts the Big Scuttlebug. The issue with this boss is that Mario cannot jump on it at first as long it's on the web. If Mario tries to jump on the Big Scuttlebug before the web breaks, he will get stuck on the web and the Big Scuttlebug will immediately bite him for damage. Mario hopes some of the stickers he found were either Fire Flowers or Ice Flowers (as, remember, Mario cannot use his hammer-related stickers without having his hammer).
The Hollow Forest from Persona 4 Golden prevents you from using any item or equipment except for those that you found within it (said items also vanish once you finish the level). Since you can't leave to go buy more items or equipment, this means that you won't have to worry about being under-equipped, since the dungeon is balanced around the equipment it gives you.
In Ravensword: Shadowlands, there's a point in the main quest where you are forced to fight against the leader of the elves with no equipment on you other than an elven dagger. However, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from taking your stuff out of the container it was put in mid-fight and then finishing the guy off with your best gear.
The Realms of Arkania trilogy has this happen a few times. Most notably in the final dungeon when your party is shrunk down in order to fight off magical insects on their own turf.
Early in Tales of Phantasia, you are stripped of your weapons and tossed in jail, but quickly (and morbidly) retrieve a replacement Long Sword from the body of another prisoner who helps you escape with her last breath. You probably just replaced your starting Long Sword, so it's not too bad... but woe to the gamer too clever for his own good who got the very nice Knight's Saber before triggering the jail scene.
Ultima:
- Ultima VII Part II:
  - You are stripped of all your weapons early on by uncontrolled teleportation magic, but quickly scrape up at least serviceable weaponry. Later on, you are thrown into prison for a crime you may or may not have chosen to actually commit and stripped of all your weapons — only to discover that THIS is where the previous game's Infinity +1 Sword was teleported at the start! The weapon retains all its previous power. Your windfall doesn't last you long, though: To escape the prison, you must destroy the gem in your sword, rendering it powerless — with the demon contained within killing the Big Bad of the prison in a rather gory fashion, letting you escape. You still get some other loot in this sequence, meaning that when you get your existing equipment back you end up the richer for having been imprisoned.
  - The Expansion Pack has more of this: Three trials that make you fight some enemies, avoid traps and such, all alone and without any of your equipment. Every time you end one of the challenges, you'll end with better and better equipment. The kicker: the ones who sent you to the trials were your ENEMIES, they were in fact trying to get you killed, and they only managed to make you stronger, richer, and better armed for the next adventures. With enemies like those...
- Ultima IX sends the Avatar into Deceit with no weapons or spells at all. Not only do you have to escape the dungeon without them, you have to complete the island's adventures before your equipment is recovered.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader: At the start of Chapter 3, your party ends up being captured by the Dark Eldar who then proceed to torture, interrogate, and experiment on you before shoving you down a trash chute into the bowels of their city, Commorragh. You wake up in a heap of corpses with multiple shattered bones, armed with nothing but a revolver given to you by a friendly Harlequin and no connection to your ship inventory, with your companions scattered across the city in only marginally better shape than you. Complicating matters further is that normally your entire party contributes to skill checks, but in this case you're completely on your own with nobody to cover your weak points. When you manage to find half of them, you're then forced into Gladiator Games against their other slaves with what little equipment you were able to scavenge in the interim.
Spirit Crucible Elpys in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a downplayed example. When you start the dungeon, you're told the particles in the air that adsorb ether to light the place up choke your Blades of the energy they use to fight, and this is reflected in gameplay. On the upper level, nobody can use level 3 specials anymore, the middle level limits you to level 1 specials, and the lower level prevents you from even reaching full affinity during battle (which prevents a lot of passives kicking in, crippling Blades who would otherwise sail on their normal attacks). Poppi, who self-produces her own ether internally, is immune to these effects so by fielding Tora you'll have at least one fighter immune to all this.
At one point in the first Xenosaga game, your party is captured and locked in a room without your weapons. Don't worry, you have chaos in your party and he gets to fight the guards on his own.

Shoot 'em Up

In Hotline Miami, the "Trauma" chapter serves as one of these. Not only are you unable to attack or pick anything up, but the camera has a disorienting and loopy effect, and the standard VHS overlay is meant to mimic poor cable television reception. This mirrors the pain and disorientation that is being felt by Jacket (whose head is still wrapped with bandages due to the gunshot wound to his head that he was recovering from) throughout the chapter.
Radiant Silvergun and its Spiritual Successor Ikaruga disable your weapons for the very final phase of the Final Boss, forcing you to hold out for 60 seconds. The latter game is justified in that your ship is charging up a last-ditch sacrificial attack to destroy the Stone-Like.

Simulation Game

In Black & White, you lose your creature for a level. The creature is most of the gameplay.

Stealth-Based Game

Assassin's Creed:
- In Assassin's Creed II, after Ezio's father and brothers are executed, a Brute disarms him and he has to run for it. It isn't until a while later that you get the Hidden Blade, and even later before you get a proper sword again.
- Assassin's Creed: Valhalla has the entire Vinland arc where Eivor is forced to leave all their gear behind in England in order to successfully sneak onto a trade ship bound for the far western continent. From there, their only options in the untamed wilderness are scrounging for resources and fashioning new weapons or trading with the local Native tribe in order to get locally-made gear for them to use.
Commandos: Happens twice in Men of Courage and once in Destination Berlin.
Dishonored has a brief one of these. After the Loyalists turn on you and poison you, you are left for dead in a prison cell with all of your gear thrown to the bottom of a shaft. Although it is entirely possible to get it all back (doing so will also net you the achievement/trophy "This is mine".), beating the rest of the game using magic powers and choke holds means that you don't necessarily need to at all.^*
Many levels in the Hitman series can optionally become this if you choose an approach that requires passing through security checkpoints or the like. This is especially true in later installments where you can Make It Look Like an Accident without any weapons at all:
- You start the last two levels of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin equipped with nothing but your trusty non-metallic strangulation wire.
- Hokkaido, the final level of Hitman (2016), takes place in a secure, isolated hospital that provides everything for its patients, meaning you can take nothing with you. Completing mastery challenges unlocks ICA dead drops, and reaching level 20 finally unlocks your gear slots again.
- Miami in Hitman 2 has you with a limited loadout for a single runthrough.
- Hitman 3 has this for a third of the levels:
  - Dubai and Berlins' initial starting points (skydiving onto the Burj al-Ghazali itself, and going after people trying to kill you) locks you with only agency pickups. Beating the level once unlocks the starting location from within their locations, and you have no restrictions.
  - Enforced with Carpathian Mountains, as you are on a moving train, with no backup. Not even any pickups either.
Manhunt frequently removes items after each level. Sometimes it is justified (e.g. bad guys in dark clothing jump Cash and take his stuff), other times discarded without discussion (e.g. when starting the journalist escort scene).
All the Metal Gear games have this in some form.
- Reversed somewhat in the original Metal Gear. In order to rescue Gray Fox, you must trick the guards into capturing you. You then encounter the first boss of the game unarmed, and must complete a short pseudo-puzzle (while dodging the boss's fire) to get back your equipment. You can then shoot the boss with remote-controlled missiles. The kicker is that there's now a transponder in your gear that will summon endless Respawning Enemies until you discard it.
- You also have to lose all your equipment to encounter Gray Fox in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, but for a different reason this time. Fox accomplishes this by setting you on fire, forcing you to go through your inventory and drop all your equipment in order to put the fire out. The final boss afterwards, Big Boss, requires you to go through a Lock and Key Puzzle, grabbing higher-security keycards to open higher-level doors and ultimately acquire a spray can and lighter to improvise a flamethrower.
- Metal Gear Solid:
  - The game only has you face one guard like this, who is easily dealt with, and then provides an excuse as to why your equipment is all in the next room over. You're being played. They wanted you to escape and use the passkey you have to override the arming system for the nuke they can't use, thinking that you're disarming it. Being captured is part of the show, to convince you it's necessary. If the guard beats you you have to try again, so the gambit will eventually pan out. They also hid a time bomb in with the rest of your equipment. If you don't notice the new addition to your inventory and get rid of it before the timer runs out, it explodes and you die.
  - One of the areas you travel through is filled with a bunch of (albeit deactivated) warheads that make firing guns really risky (even if they won't go up, they could leak radiation), so your Mission Control calls to note that your nanomachines are programmed to prevent you from firing guns in that room. Not like it stops the guards from shooting at you if they catch you, though.
  - The final boss must be fought hand-to-hand. The player isn't given any of their weapons back for the escape sequence either, having to rely on a mounted gun on the back of the escape vehicle.
- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has its famous stretch where the character is stripped of both his equipment AND his clothing (leaving him stark naked), receiving strange calls on the codec. Like in the first MGS, you also have your weapons taken away for the final boss, leaving you nothing but the high-frequency blade he hands you just before it starts for real.
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has a point where you get captured and stripped of almost all your weapons, along with all your equipment and food, leaving you with only a fork and a gun with no ammunition with which to make your escape. It is, however, possible to trick the guard into giving you another weapon before attempting your escape — he pilfered your smokes, unaware that they're fake cigarettes that can emit sleeping gas, and will give them back if you throw enough food back at him to get him to talk to you — and you can also knock him out to get smoke grenades once you're out of your cell.
- Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops puts a good twist on it. As in the other games, Big Boss/Snake is captured, and stripped of his equipment... but this time, the Red Shirt Army he's spent the whole game recruiting has to search for him and break him out.
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots's final boss, as usual. The game even makes a point of destroying Snake's OctoCamo and Solid Eye during the events immediately before the fight.
- Happens again in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. As is common in the series, you have to enact a prison escape without your gear, though it's a little easier than the second and third games thanks to a short length and retaining CQC. In an interesting variation, you don't get all your items back after escaping. Instead, an Extra Op is unlocked where you must play as MSF soldier(s) to recover some of the items Snake had taken from him when he got captured.
- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain's Subsistence missions force the player to wear Olive Drab camo and have no weapons. Supply drops are also disabled, meaning the only source of weapons and ammunition is within enemy guard posts. The "No Traces" bonus makes it worse. In order to get this bonus, you cannot use weapons or attack enemies at all (though hold-ups and subsequent interrogations are still allowed).
Splinter Cell:
- The last mission in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory has a short sequence involving the protagonist's capture in the final level; the area you're sneaking into is patrolled by guards using non-lethal weapons that KO you instead. Not as egregious as the others, as you are not actually thrown in prison, but stripped of your equipment and taken to an impromptu interrogation. When the guards enter the adjacent room, the player is given the chance to pick the lock on the handcuffs, allowing you to deal with your captors and retrieve your gear. Also, there is no Cutscene Incompetence involved; if you're captured, it's because you made a mistake all by yourself.
- Splinter Cell: Double Agent has a couple. The first is fully justified since it involves escaping a maximum-security prison, and the later is hand waved with Sam saying "I wish you had given me more warning; I don't have my gear ready."
- Splinter Cell: Blacklist has the London level, where Sam, after being exposed to nerve gas, is forced to trudge past several enemies unarmed. Afterward, he gains a pistol and stun gun, but is put up against a group of commandos, which would have been hell if Briggs wasn't there to help you.
Syphon Filter:
- This happens twice in 2: Lian escapes from an Air Force base in nothing but a hospital gown, and Gabe escapes from an Agency base after being stripped of his equipment. Both retrieve their gear towards the end of the level. There's also the third level where you need to search the truck for gear, or a psuedo example in the sewer level where you lose everything but Teresa gives you a .45 at the beginning.
- Part 3 has Gabe rescuing hostages and disarming bombs carrying only a pistol while Mara's mooks wear body armor and carry automatics.
- In the first bonus mission from Omega Strain, you only have a single bullet to snipe the Mafia boss with, so you must use the Neck Snap to take out any bodyguards in the way without being spotted. A couple missions later, your chopper gets shot down in Mazyr, Belarus, leaving you with only your pistol and melee weapon, and you have to find the crash site to retrieve your gear, fighting through much more heavily armed Mooks along the way. In the second bonus mission, also a stealth mission, Lian Xing is undercover and armed only with poisoned shurikens; if a guard gets too close, they will see through her disguise. Then there's the Arms Bazaar in Yemen, another stealth mission that starts you out with just a knife and a civilian disguise, although you get a silenced sniper rifle and night-vision goggles early on. Done yet again in the second Yemen mission, where you have five minutes to stealth kill all the guards in the first room without them sounding the alarm.
Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven averts this, to the point that it seems stupid. At one point in the game, Ayame winds up captured. There is nothing you can do to prevent this, as it (and her eventual escape) is part of the plot. However, between the mission where you are captured, and the mission where you escape, you are allowed to choose your inventory. Even though inventory selection is done at her base of operations. Even assuming that the inventory screen is really just window dressing and not the home base, one wonders how it is that Ayame is able to select any weapon in her entire inventory while she's locked up in prison. Stealing back weapons she had on her when she was captured, OK. Equipping weapons that she left at home before she got captured, though, doesn't make sense.
Thief:
- In Thief: The Dark Project, Garrett has his gear taken away and his eye plucked out by the Big Bad. Garrett starts the level with no gear at all, but if you have the presence of mind to search the room you start in you'll easily find his bow and some other useful items.
- In Thief: Deadly Shadows, the trope is played straight if the City Guards capture you, as they will toss Garrett into prison and you have to break out. This trope is also popular in fan-made missions. The difficulty depends on whether you've been depending on your weapons to get by, or if you've properly honed your stealth skills.

Survival Horror

Alan Wake has the annoying habit of dropping all of his weapons, lights and ammo in between the chapters. Sometimes even in the same chapter due to cutscene stupidity. One part of the game forces you to navigate an area filled with bear traps without any weapons, and getting caught in a trap spawns an enemy that you can't kill due to your lack of weapons. If you get caught in one, you're bound to get caught in another since you now have to flee from the enemy chasing you instead of taking it slow and careful, which means there are now two enemies chasing you, and it continues to spiral downhill from there.
Alien: Isolation:
- When Amanda has to go to the APOLLO Core, an automated checkpoint will not let her through unless she surrenders her firearms in a secured receptacle before passing through a security scanner. The next section of the game must be completed without guns, though crafted items, her stun baton and maintenance jack are still available to her.
- Anytime Amanda has to don a spacesuit or when you're playing as Marlow (himself in a suit as well) in his flashback, the player is cut off from using any of their tools, though Marlow at least gets a unique scanner to help point him to his objective.
The first third of the Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is played like this, and after that you still lose all your weapons on several occasions to retain the horror feel. Once you're strangely quickly given a pistol, even though the only monster in the level is utterly immune to bullets, and in other time you're reduced to a pistol, even though you would think that being sent to help a party of soldiers would call for more arsenal.
Condemned: Criminal Origins: The final level strips the air taser that the player has had the entire game. The extremely efficient air taser that it was easy to rely on as the primary weapon through the entire game.
Cry of Fear has a level where you lose all your weapons and items (including your undroppable cell phone) in a train crash, and if that wasn't enough, you also lose three inventory slots. Right after, the player is given a rather weak but useful tree branch and a lantern.
Dead Rising:
- If Frank gets captured by cultists, he's stripped to his underwear and put in a box. You have to break out of the box and fight your way through hordes of cultists, armed with only a step-ladder (until you find the katana on a shelf). Notably, you can avoid this by defeating them at distance and thus avoiding their gas attack. This is rather difficult in most cases, although the Infinity Plus One Mega Buster renders it laughably easy. And when the Army shows up near the end, they will capture you if you "die." They strip you to your boxers and tie you up. Oddly though, even though they are there to cover up the incident, they take your pants but not your camera.
- You lose your entire inventory during the Final Boss fight, so you're forced to used Good Old Fisticuffs. It's not that unfair, since the final boss doesn't use any weapons either.
- In the second game, the looters can capture Chuck if they manage to knock him down. They will strip him of his clothes and take his items, then throw him in a bathroom.
In Dead Space 2, the first level consists of running past necromorphs in a straitjacket. Oh, and to make matters worse, Isaac's health bar is alarmingly low. Have fun.
Fatal Frame II: Mio dropped her ghost-capturing camera after she was surprised by a ghost in the tunnel between haunted houses full of ghosts. Yeah, that's just as lame as it sounds, especially because the camera is her only "weapon" in the game. Worse, the very next puzzle can lock you with a ghost that is supposedly trivial to defeat, if only Mio has her camera.
During The Stinger of ObsCure II (as in, it turns out that the end credits weren't the actual ending), Shannon and Stan find themselves kidnapped by the Greater-Scope Villain and stripped of their weapons. After they escape when monsters wreck the van they were in, they must defend themselves with only a flare gun (which is actually a very handy weapon when fighting darkness monsters) and a baseball bat. They recover most of their weapons before facing the True Final Boss.
Resident Evil:
- Sherry's segment in Resident Evil 2 amounts to a no gear run when you take control of her. It is justified since Sherry doesn't use weapons and thankfully, the sections with Sherry are short, have enemies that you can dodge, and she has almost double the amount of defense compared to Claire.
- Resident Evil 2 (Remake) also has the no-gear level where you play as Sherry, but rather than dodging enemies she has to play Cat and Mouse with the repulsive murderous potential rapist that is Police Chief Irons in a creepy orphanage, complete with a "HERE'S JOHNNY!" Shout-Out where Irons smashes through a window.
- Claire starts the game with no weapons in Resident Evil – Code: Veronica and Resident Evil: Revelations 2. Starting both games waking up after being knocked out in a jail cell.
- The segment where you play as Ashley in Resident Evil 4 amounts to this. Ashley can fight back by throwing lanterns at enemies, but that's about it.
- Resident Evil 5 has the Lost in Nightmares DLC where Chris and Jill fall through a floor and crash into a basement. Somehow, the fall causes them to lose all the guns and items they collected. To make matters worse, there are monsters roaming around with huge axes that have to be lured into traps in order to kill them off.
- In Resident Evil 6, Jake and Sherry are captured and stripped of all their gear at the beginning of Chapter 3. Thankfully, for those who chose to play as Jake, his bare hands tend to do more damage than his guns anyways.
- In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Lucas Baker won't let you through a certain door unless you put every single item you're carrying into storage.
- Resident Evil Village has the Beneviento manor, where a sneaky doll steals all of your items, and before getting them back you must hide from a monster in a way reminiscent of Clock Tower.
- Resident Evil Containment: Episode 3 begins with Ghost getting up from a nasty fall from the previous episode. Said fall broke both of his guns and left his health in Danger status. You're forced to navigate a forest full of zombie dogs in this condition.
Silent Hill:
- At one point in Silent Hill 2, you're required to use an elevator that can hold one person. And only one person. You have to drop all your weapons and health items, ride the elevator down, then work your way back to your possessions.
- In Silent Hill: Homecoming, Alex begins the final level with all his (by now, considerable) stock of weapons missing. Thankfully, a quick look around the area turns up the combat knife and a basic pistol. Find an optional semi-hidden key and you'll gain access to the locker room, where all your items are conveniently stashed.
- Every time you nearly fall to your death and have to climb up to safety in Silent Hill: Downpour, you'll reach the top with none of your weapons, items, or even first aid kits. You don't get your lost gear back, either; this is the game's sneaky way of keeping you from hoarding your items.

Third-Person Shooter

Destroy All Humans!:
- The first game has one of these when Crypto's craft gets shot down in Union Town and he gets caught by Majestic.
- Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon: At the start of the final boss fight against the giant robotic head of Emperor Meningitis, Crypto is unable to use his weapons in the Emperor's throne room and must rely on his psychic powers. Fortunately, he gets them back after taking out the Emperor's defenses in the first phase of the fight.
Duke Nukem: In the first level of Zero Hour's wild west episode, Duke gets wrongly accused of a bank robbery and held at gunpoint by two female marshals. Of course, there's this whole alien invasion going on, but the law's the law. Duke quips how it would be a shame to shoot "the women folk", and being a well-known gentleman lets them arrest him. You start the next level in a jail cell with all your equipment gone.
Escape from Butcher Bay has more No Gear Levels than normal ones. Most guards have guns you can't use, so you go around meleeing everybody. Every now and then the game lets you grab a non-DNA-coded gun you can actually use, only to remove it from you a short while later.
This happens several times to James Bond in Everything or Nothing. Quite frankly, you end up wondering why they even bother to take his weapons at all, when there are so many unlocked armories for Bond to take his pick from. In general, Bond is infamous for this, because the enemies never take away his gadgets.
The Max Payne games do this:
- In the original game, after getting the crap beaten out of him by Frankie "the Bat" Niagara, Max has to sneak past Frankie's men until he can get his weapons back. In order to illustrate the badass nature of Max Payne, it's important to reiterate the point: after getting pummeled with a baseball bat to the point of death, Max Payne had to escape being tied to a chair, grab the bat that had been used to whack the bejeezus out of him, use it to whack the mooks and get their guns, then go to town. It is also possible to get the mooks to shoot at each other, and finish off the remaining ones, like anyone would do in a weaponless level. Also, if you wait and observe their pattern, it is possible to get out of the basement without alerting any guards and also raiding a supply room for almost all the weapons you had lost.
- In Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, he has to evade assassins at the hospital until he can obtain a weapon from a fallen security guard and turn the tables. He also loses everything at the start of the second chapter... then the police station gets attacked.
- Max Payne 3 pulls this at the beginning of the third chapter where Max is forced to disarm. To add insult to injury, he gets shot in the arm by a sniper, crippling his mobility and causing vision blur and periodic blackouts.
Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion has two examples:
- Every station has an Equipper that allows you to select a weapon loadout for that mission. However, some stations only have one available loadout — no weapons at all. These stages usually require you to find more creative means of reaching the goal, such as using cannons, finding canned weapons, or simply dodging enemy fire until a time limit runs out.
- The final area of the Expansion starts out like this because there isn't an Equipper, since you are now going Off the Rails and escaping from the facility. The first phase of the escape is a Stealth-Based Mission where you need to sneak past the Sanitized Octarians guarding the facility. Eventually, you find Splat Bombs and an Octo Shot, which let you fight your way to the surface.
Warframe: Should the player complete enough Invasion missions for the Grineer, the Corpus respond by having Alad V sic his Zanuka Hunter on the player if they enter a Corpus-controlled node. Should it succeed in defeating the player, their Frame is captured and held hostage until they play a unique mission, "Recovery", where said captured Frame must regain its weapons and disabled powers. Stealth is highly advised, as the Frame's bare fists are fairly weak, though using Stealth Finishers on several enemies will still kill them with ease.

Turn-Based Strategy

At the end of the third chapter of Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, Leif and Lifis are thrown into jail along with Karin and Fergus; all of them have had their equipment stripped away from them and put into chests scattered around the prison. You have to use your three new recruits with weapons (Brighton, Machyua and Lara) to get them out of their cells and to help them recover their equipment quickly, since the game mechanics allow any disarmed unit to be captured instantly.
At the end of the Life Missions in Heroes of Might and Magic IV, you get to keep your items but are stripped of your entire army, to fight the final end boss with just the story's main character. However, the enemy is also a lone general, who's probably lower level and has no ranks in Combat, so you can generally trounce him.
Valkyria Chronicles:
- Chapter 8 sees Welkin and Alicia separated from the rest of the platoon, minus the Edelweiss (Welkin functions as a Scout when he is on foot) and features two battle scenes. In the first, the player must sneak them past Imperial troopers and searchlights. To make matters worse, Alicia starts out with an injured ankle that greatly decreases her speed and mobility until the duo find healing herbs. The second battle takes place at a river gorge, where the rest of the squad waits for them on the other side. As there are no other tank commanders in the squad, the Edelweiss cannot be used until Welkin reaches it, though it can be targeted by enemy rockets.
- Also applies to two DLC mini-campaigns. "Edy Detachment Challenge" forces you to use specific units, who are all reset to a predetermined level and with a predetermined loadout, both of which are almost guaranteed to be weaker then what you have in the main campaign. Meanwhile, "Behind Her Blue Flame" gives you control of Selvaria in all her overpowered glory, but also forces her to drag along a team of mediocre Imperial units who haven't even reached Elite status.
Downplayed in the XCOM: Enemy Unknown expansion Enemy Within. A group of human terrorists called EXALT are out to hinder XCOM's operation as much as they can. Neutralizing them involves locating some of their cells, and sending a covert operative to investigate them. Covert operatives cannot bring armor and main weapons on their missions, only items and a handgun. Six days later, they get the information, but their cover is blown, forcing you to send a squad to rescue your operative, or he/she will get KIA and the intelligence will be lost. While your squad can pack as much heat as you can afford, your covert operative will have to survive with limited gear and being separated from your squad.

Wide-Open Sandbox

While it's not all your gear, or even most of it, a portion of Death Stranding makes you forego your BB, rendering the BTs completely invisible to you and not only restricting your ability to explore but also from advancing too far west until you get it back.
The Grand Theft Auto series has multiple instances of this:
- In order to complete the "Penal Ties" mission in the Residential district of Grand Theft Auto 2, you have to get arrested, and thereby get stripped of all your weapons.
- The last story mission of Grand Theft Auto III sees you stripped of the possible thousands-of-pounds of weaponry and ammunition you might be carrying in the opening cutscene before you punch out a guard and steal his pistol. The rest of the mission requires you to keep pace with your fleeing ex-girlfriend turned crime lord while properly re-arming yourself to stay alive and eventually shoot down the helicopter she's escaping in. If the player finds many of the packages and is swift with a vehicle, it is possible to swing by a safehouse and load up on the goodies.
- In general, the installments from Vice City on, on account of having a Limited Loadout you can swap out for different guns, will often take your stronger weapons and replace them with weaker ones as a story necessity, thereby cheating you out of your hard-earned equipment.
- In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Tommy is asked to persuade someone to part with some land by going to the country club and beating the crap out of him. There's a metal detector at the entrance which places all your weapons outside (you can pick them up again when you leave) — but this trope is subverted because it is possible to jump over the outside wall and enter the country club with all your equipment. The metal detector only takes away your guns and grenades, though. Entering with a chainsaw is perfectly fine. This happens in the airport terminal, too, and you can't get around that one.
- In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, CJ loses all his guns several times. After you've finished the story missions for the first city, you're dumped out of town with no weapons. Later on, after the helicopter he's gunning down from gets shot down and crashes in water, you must then make your way aboard the gangster-ridden container ship you were attacking and acquire guns by killing gang members with your knife. (Or you can simply swim ashore, buy new weapons, and go back). Another mission, Stowaway, has CJ inside a plane loaded with explosives (possibly landmines). Shooting in there is not forbidden, no — but one shot that misses a government agent mook in there means hitting the explosives and the whole thing goes kaboom. Players are likely to resort to melee weapons or unarmed combat in there, risking no such thing — especially since getting into the plane in the first place is That One Level Part players are unlikely to want to repeat.^note
- In Grand Theft Auto V, a few of Michael's missions are like this.
  - "Dead Man Walking" has Michael loaded into a morgue, stripped of his weapons. You acquire a pistol by steathily knocking out a government spook and use it to fight through more spooks. Thankfully, you're able to regain your arsenal later on, and Dave, the Mission Control for the mission, notifies you about it.
  - "Bury The Hatchet" has Michael in North Yankton with only a pistol, the justification being that his weapons were removed on the flight. You have to face a group of Triads equipped with shotguns and assault rifles using only your pistol... which would've been problematic were it not for Michael's Bullet Time special ability.
Minecraft has you drop all of your items upon death, which means you're forced to endure the game without any weapons or tools when you respawn unless you are quick enough to get back to where you died or had stored extra items away in a chest. Many custom maps that take advantage of Command Blocks can also strip you of all your items if the block is programmed to do so.
Scarface: The World Is Yours does this in the mission where Tony returns to Freedomtown, confiscating his weapons and springing an ambush on him. It also does... something like this at the start of the assault on the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, dropping all the stuff in Tony's Hyperspace Arsenal for a Desert Eagle and rather limited ammo. You have to collect guns off fallen enemies to keep fighting.

Miscellaneous Games

In several levels of the Driver series, e.g., "The President's Run" and "Chase the Gunman", you are given a slow, clunky car and forced to flee from or chase much faster opponents.
In LEGO The Lord of the Rings, in keeping with the movie, you can't go before Theoden King so armed, by order of Grima Wormtongue. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli have to fight guards with their bare hands or with conveniently placed candlesticks. Thankfully, Gandalf has his staff and if you heal Theoden quickly you won't be without your gear for very long.
Naval Ops: While your weapons are bolted onto the ship and cannot be removed, Warship Gunner 2 has one mission where your ship has expended all of its ammunition and needs to resupply by taking over an enemy depot (presumably with a contingent of marines). Fortunately, the only opposition comes from coastal defense guns that are more annoying than anything else.
Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity does this literally in three missions in Mission Mode. In these missions, your character (Amy in one, Storm in the next and Jet in the last) is locked into their on-foot Charge mode and are tasked with fighting off an army of robots. While Charge mode allows them to reach speeds far higher than they do on their boards, the way the stages are set up for the mission and the skill and speed that the enemy AI have in evading you means that you HAVE to be running for as much time as possible to hit all of them, meaning that outside of trick ramps, your Gravity Control and Gear Parts are absolutely useless.
In the final four races of the 6th-gen Test Drive reboot, the game takes away all your previous cars and has you race an ancient Ford GT-40 against a Dodge Viper Competition Coupe.
Happens bizarrely enough in Tony Hawk's Underground when you surrender your skateboard to go and get your friend's skateboard back from a bunch of drug dealers. Essentially, this is an excuse to give you a tutorial on the off-foot mechanic.
In the story mode of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's Stardust Accelerator, the player gets sent to jail after breaking into Neo Domino City, duel runner and cards confiscated in the process. While you use borrowed cards to win your freedom, it takes a little Stealth-Based Mission to get your stuff back.

Non-Video Game examples

Fan Works

In Avengers: Infinite Wars, Anakin Skywalker and Scott Lang have to deal with a variation of this when they're caught in a hostage crisis in the Senate, as Padme has Anakin's lightsabre and Scott's suit is having work done.
In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, the Assassins' Guild School has created a new refinement when it comes to practical training. Famke Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons is sent for corrective training to what the Guild calls the Sensory Deprivation Chamber, and is locked in there for an hour to reflect on her recent misbehaviour, and to assess how she copes with the absolute bare minimum of sensory input. Prior to going in, her mentor has her empty all her pockets, even the hidden ones, and checks the usual places in her boots and belt to make sure nothing is hidden. Famke is going in there metaphorically, but not literally, "naked".^noteShe is only twelve, after all.
"Famke. In there there is only you. Nothing else. Only you."
Several guest stars in Vow of Nudity are not nudists, but instead victims of circumstances which left them stranded somewhere naked and forced to team up with Haara. Fiora, for example, got sucked through a portal to the demon realm without her spellbook or arcane focus after some Stark Naked Sorcery, forcing her to scrounge material components from the environment to cast what few (mostly noncombat) spells she'd happened to prepare that day.

Gamebooks

Fighting Fantasy: A few gamebooks in this series have your player character starting with minimal or no equipment at all.
- House of Hell: Your character is a Ridiculously Average Guy who got stranded in the titular house, full of demon-worshiping cultists and undead monsters, while unarmed and without any default equipment. You'll need to find a weapon as soon as possible before getting into a fight.
- Master of Chaos: You started the game as a galley slave, equipped with only a pair of hollowed-out boots hiding some gold coins. If you get into a fight with a Kraken's tentacle, you have to beat it with the ball and chain attached to your leg.
- In Island of the Undead you are a simple fisherman investigating the undead-infested Solani Island, armed with only a puny knife. You can obtain better weapons as the game progress on.
- Subverted in Trial of Champions; you start off as a slave-turned-gladiator without any weapons or equipment, but as soon as you're put into gladiatorial combat you'll be given appropriate weapons immediately.
The whole book 4 of the GrailQuest series, Voyage of Terror. The hero Pip is accidentally sent to ancient Greece instead of Avalon, and starts out with none of the usual equipment, nor the numerous magical items that could have been gathered during the three precedent books, including Excalibur Junior. Sure, you can find some new weapons, armors and magic along the way, but none of the usual fare until the next book.
This can happen every couple of books early on in the Lone Wolf series. Of course, you're still a psionic badass. Notably: in Book 2, after you get shipwrecked; in Book 5, 9 and 17, if Lone Wolf has to get out of jail; and unavoidably in Book 7, Castle Death, when thrown into The Maze.

Literature

InCryptid: In Midnight Blue-Light Special, Verity is captured by the Covenant and stripped of her clothing and weapons. She wakes up tied to a chair with nothing but a thin bathrobe on, and once she gets out of her restraints, has to escape literally naked (since she ditches the robe for more mobility). Good thing she's from a Badass Family and went through Training from Hell to prepare for situations just like this (and that Dominic and Sarah show up to rescue her).
The Witch of Knightcharm: Emily, a rookie witch at an evil Wizarding School, begins taking extra physical combat training from the elite student Ceranna. At the training's outset, Ceranna forbids Emily from using her various crafted items because she (Ceranna) thinks Emily has been using those tools as crutches and relying on them instead of developing real power. Emily is thus forced to do all her extra training without any of her tools.

Live-Action TV

Blake's 7: In "The Harvest of Kairos", the Liberator and their two Master Computers are captured by Servalan, who abandons the protagonists on a Death World.
Doctor Who:
- The Doctor will occasionally lose access to both their TARDIS and their Sonic Screwdriver, forcing them to cobble something with whatever technology is at hand ("The Woman Who Fell to Earth"), rummage through their pockets for anything useful ("Wild Blue Yonder"), or negotiate their way out of conflicts ("The Eleventh Hour").
- In "The Woman Who Fell to Earth", the antagonist, Tzim-Sha, is participating in a ritual hunt where he's not supposed to have any weapons. However, he's cheating by using a data coil to gather information on his target.
Kamen Rider Drive has the final episode, where Shinnosuke is forced to take on an adversary without any of the Drive gear. Even when he gets his hand on an Eyecon which could help him, he chooses not to use it.
Leverage: "The Cross My Heart Job" takes place in the aftermath of a particularly disastrous job that cleaned out the team's entire bag of tricks — no earbuds or lockpicks even — and sees them grift and Indy Ploy their way through rescuing a kidnapped girl and a stolen donor heart all in the space of an hour.

Tabletop Games

The Ars Magica module "The Sorcerer's Slave" requires the Player Characters to investigate a rogue mage at Byzantium's famous Baths of Zeuxippus. All visitors to the Baths are required to disrobe, so it's a no-gear level for them unless they get very creative.
Dungeons & Dragons: At the end of adventure A3, Aerie of the Slave Lords, the characters are captured by the title opponents: they have no chance to avoid it. At the beginning of adventure A4, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, they wake up in the title location with no weapons, though they can improvise some from their belongings.
One Pathfinder module has the party trying to retrieve an item from a shop in a section of a marketplace where weapons aren't allowed (except for the shops' guards) and magic is suppressed, and the shopkeeper doesn't want to sell it. (Judging by the Dungeon Master notes, the expected method of obtaining it is to use items in the shop as improvised weapons.)
The Shadowrun module series "Harlequin" features one scenario where the player characters are railroaded into being captured by agents working for the main antagonist, before being stripped naked and subjected to Cold-Blooded Torture. Escaping their imprisonment requires arming (and clothing) themselves as they go.

Western Animation

The Captain N: The Game Master episode "Metroid Sweet Metroid" involves this. Mother Brain pretends to run out of power, and a portal back to Earth opens to take Captain N home. He gives back his power items before he goes, then finds out it was a trick and he's actually in Mother Brain's fortress. She drops Captain N into the monster-infested maze of the game, expecting him to die without his powers. Unfortunately for her, he's mastered Metroid and manages to get to the end thanks to his Genre Savvy status. Interesting for being an example before video games made this trope a thing.
This happens in two episodes of Codename: Kids Next Door, and both instances involve Extended Disarming:
- "Operation: E.N.G.L.A.N.D." sees Numbuh 1 travelling to England with his father. However, he suddenly gets embroiled in a mission involving Sector E, the British KND, and Nigel laments that the difficulty is exacerbated by the lack of his 2x4 technology, having surrendered all of them back at the airport.
- Numbuh 2 also suffers this in "Operation: A.M.I.S.H.", when he is forced into hiding in Sector A, known as amish country, much to his extreme displeasure when a mysterious force is abducting Kids Next Door scientists, and his teammates can't risk him being next. He can't even use one weapon to defend himself if he is found, being forced to hand over all of his weapons to the operatives in charge of the sector; took him one hour to hand over all of his weapons. Moreover, nothing really exciting happens in amish country.
Played with in The Legend of Vox Machina when the heroes attend a feast and are forced to check their weapons at the door. When the inevitable fight arrives, they rush to collect them and discover they've lost the ticket... so they knock the door guard aside and retrieve their gear by force. Played straight with Vax, who sneaks away from the feast to do recon and is reduced to using a shard of broken glass as an improvised shiv, to no effect.
In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, when Twilight and her friends are sent to save the Crystal Empire, they go in without the Elements of Harmony and have to rely on their own inherent abilities and whatever they can find in the empire to save the day. It's implied to be part of the criteria of Princess Celestia's test, or at least how Twilight interpreted the criteria, as part of it is that it must be Twilight alone who assists Princess Cadance and Shining Armor in saving the day.

Good grief, he's naked!

Examples

Video Game examples

Non-Video Game examples

Alternative Title(s): Powerless Run, Warring Without Weapons, No Equipment Level

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