Apocalyptic games are designed to keep players part of destructive and catastrophic worlds. Apocalypses or events that signal the ending of a world are created by game developers who carry imagined playstyles for the games they design. However, the game developer's imaginary does not align with all playstyles and game experiences because players of their games lose attention or interpret game elements differently than the designer. In these moments when playstyles and a player’s game experience are unsustainable for the player, the game environment constructs a rhetoric of unsustainability, defined as elements of play and design that produce responses demanding change to the game environment. These elements appear as revulsion, discomforting a player's senses by forcing them into familiar environments with unfamiliar things, keeping players stuck in the hesitancy of game events by focusing on action, and forcing players to see what would otherwise be unfamiliar as infatuated. This study uses qualitative video game content analysis to develop the rhetoric of unsustainability, which can be part of a theoretical foundation for game user research and critical game design. The rhetoric of unsustainability helps to elicit that game designers’ imaginaries do not need to account for all imagined playstyles or align with the playstyles of their players. Still, the game environment must be prepared to direct the player's flow of play. Creating conditions in which players attempt to change the game environment is mediated by their attempts to sustain it.