I can’t stop watching these Dune: Awakening videos of players having butt-puckeringly close calls with angry sandworms

Dune: Awakening’s sandworms aren’t just scary, they’re the most brutally punishing feature of Funcom’s new survival MMO. When you get eaten by a sandworm, you permanently lose all your stuff. Weapons, armor, tools, gear, your entire inventory gets swallowed up when Shai-Hulud sucks you down, and you can’t go back and recover it. Even your vehicle is gone forever.

That’s why crossing the desert gaps between regions is so harrowing: the worm is always out there patrolling and your movements will bring it stampeding toward you, leading to lots of tense moments. Linger too long in the dunes and the sandworm will charge, its mouth the size of a train tunnel, gobbling down everything in front of it.

So my new hobby is jumping onto the Dune subreddit every day to see some white-knuckle, butt-puckeringly close calls with sandworms. Knowing what’s at stake, seeing a player flooring it across the desert with a worm barreling toward them, and jussssssst escaping to safety is utterly thrilling.

Here’s a few of my favorite sandworm close-calls:

Barely made it from r/duneawakening

Soooooo close. I love this video. You know you’re in real trouble when the camera starts zooming out to show the full size of the worm that’s eating you. The ridiculous airtime of that long bike jump as the worm jusssssssst misses its target is beautiful.

“It’s just about being not the slowest” from r/duneawakening

Just as with a bear, shark, or Jason Vorhees, you don’t really need to be fast to escape a sandworm, you just need to be faster than one other person.

Shai-Hulud eating some one else. from r/duneawakening

If you see the worm going after another player, that doesn’t mean you’re safe. Anything that gets in Shai-Hulud’s way gets swallowed, including the unfortunate random player in the clip above. Shai-Hulud almost got a two-fer!

Almost shit myself with this worm encounter from r/duneawakening

Tarry a bit too long while scrapping a crashed ship in the dunes, and Shai-Hulud will be along to swallow you and the wreck both. Luckily, the silly worm chose a poor spot to start its charge from and bonked its face against the rocks. Maybe next time!

As close as you can get and tell about it. from r/duneawakening

Talk about a rough night. First this player gets targeted by Sardaukar assassins, then downed—twice—while fighting them. Midway through the skirmish a sandworm breaches in the background, but the player is close enough to the rocks to not be in danger, and the worm vanishes.

Surprise! It’s suddenly back again, presumably to swallow the dead soldiers, missing the recovering player by maybe a foot or two. It’s so close they’re actually buried in the sand from the worm’s breach. Yikes.

Threw in my own encounter above, though I didn’t escape through speed, I escaped by cleverly dying of other causes before the worm had a chance to eat me. After getting stuck in Dune: Awakening’s quicksand, my bike sank for a while as I fruitlessly and stupidly tried to gun the engine. Just as the worm appeared and headed my way, my bike exploded, killing me.

I know it doesn’t sound like a happy ending, but I only lost my bike and a couple resources from my backpack. If the worm had gotten me, I’d have lost everything. Thanks, explosions!