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Cruel And Unusual Death / Video Games

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  • American McGee's Alice:
    • A guillotine is a device that was designed to prevent a victim from suffering. However, the White Queen is executed this way by the Red Chess pieces facing upward, for no other reason than to instill terror.
    • The White Rabbit ends up Squashed Flat under the heel of the Mad Hatter, like an insect.
  • The old vector graphics game, Another World, is practically made out of this trope. Not only does everything on the planet want to kill the protagonist, it wants to kill him in the most gruesome way possible. Roll the clip!
  • Ao Oni: Most versions have some variation of this, including head-chomp, being used as an exercise mat, and being swallowed whole implied, via Version 6.23's ending). Also, South Park-mode has, particularly brutal death scenes.
  • Many of the Boss monsters in The Aquatic Adventure Of The Last Human die in pretty gruesome ways.
  • The fate of the last guard in Arrival In Hell. The Beast scatters his body parts and blood all across the room once he gets ahold of him. Thankfully, the protagonist and the player only get to see the aftermath.
  • The Joker's death in Batman: Arkham City certainly qualifies. Dying slowly from blood poisoning that makes your skin look decayed and riddled with scars must've been a pretty unpleasant way to go.
  • BioShock:
    • This appears frequently in the first BioShock:
      • A Big Daddy can kill you by running you through with a giant drill.
      • The plasmids that the player character uses can do this as well, such as sending killer bees at your enemies with the Insect Swarm plasmid, and burning them alive with the Incinerate! plasmid, or shooting electricity at them when standing in water with the Electro Bolt plasmid.
      • One of the most disturbing deaths is that of Andrew Ryan. After just finding out you've been mind-controlled the entire game and the guy who has been trying to kill you this whole time is your father, he asks you oh so kindly if you would assist in Ryan's suicide. You could technically have just whipped out your revolver and put a bullet in his brain to make it more humane, but nope, he decides to have you beat his face in with a golf club, and doesn't even go down until three more brutal whacks to the skull, while his face becomes more horrifyingly mangled and distorted, as he lets out a few more disturbingly garbled screams for you to obey. Top it off with part of the golf club breaking off and lodging into his cranium with a final spurt of blood.
    • BioShock Infinite:
      • After Comstock continues his decades-long abuse of Elizabeth, in person for once, Booker grabs Comstock's head and repeatedly smashes it against the baptism basin, followed by drowning.
      • Also, Elizabeth summons a portal that leads to a midwestern tornado. The asshole victims beg her to stop until they're inevitably sucked in.
      • Yi Suchong was impaled by a Big Daddy drill, then smashed into the table and drilled until it ripped off the Big Daddy's arm. You get to see this yourself in the Infinite DLC.
  • BloodRayne allows the player to do a variety of these frequently — Carnage kills begin with a chained harpoon catch and end in a fling into one or more impaling objects (or electrocution, fire, or industrial meat grinders). In one kick move, Rayne jumps onto an opponent's shoulders, catching the neck between her feet, then flips forward to stomp the head into the ground. But the most splatteriffic is when she lifts an enemy with one impaling blade, spins them in the air with a flick of the other, then lets the edge of it hack off all limbs and heads before throwing the pruned torso away.
  • Some of the deaths in Brain Dead 13 may vary, from being torn apart vertically at the eyes by Fritz, to getting your skull knocked off of your head.
  • Essentially the entire point of Bulletstorm is to find the most creative ways to kill enemies, after which you get given points based on your creativity which functions as currency. Or at least, that's the point until you realize nothing can ever truly rack up points as quickly and easily as simply locating the nearest set of spikes and kicking every enemy into them one by one.
  • Clock Tower:
    • The first game in the series is quite mundane with its death scenes, but one that stands out is what happens if you fail to pick up the ham before getting locked in the shed; Simon Barrows will eat Jennifer instead. Also, some people theorize that the reason no blood is seen on Laura (as well as her face being hidden) in her shower death scene is because she was scalded to death with hot water (the 10-page manga changes this to her being stabbed while hung in the shower).
    • In Clock Tower 3, a 12-year-old girl has her face smashed with a sledgehammer, a man and his old mother are pushed into a vat of acid, and another man falls off a balcony where his head hits an ax and splits in half.
  • Crusader Kings II: Many of the executions, but also some of the murder methods are this, complete with sound effects. Do you want to hear a woman's bones being pried apart by a medieval torture wheel? Hear a man be mauled by a bear? Be trampled to death by an elephant? This game has you covered. One of the methods is having someone Buried Alive inside a wall, a reference to The Cask of Amontillado.
  • In Cyberpunk 2077, The Cracker T-Bug gets caught by Arasaka during The Heist at the start of the game, and the last thing you hear is her screams of agony. You later find out from her friend Yoko that they found her with her nervous system "fried", and she compares the sensation to being impaled by thousands of knives.
  • Dead by Daylight: The killer will hang his/her victims from a hook in most cases, where, after some (usually) futile struggling, they get stabbed by some sort of ghostly sky-spider.
  • Deadly Premonition gives each of the victims a pretty painful death.
    • Anna Graham had her tongue bitten off and then she was sliced from her chest to her crotch, left to bleed out at full consciousness.
    • Becky Ames has her tongue removed the same way, is flayed alive, and then strung up by wires in her bathroom. Which, when cut, causes a trigger to activate that breaks her neck with her bloodstained bed sheets.
    • Diane Ames had the same tongue thing, was stabbed in her side, and appeared to be left to bleed out. But she was strung up above a huge and very spikey metal statue, which would have impaled her, had the ropes broken. And when that is avoided, the statue ends up falling and smashing her to bits.
  • Dead Rising:
  • Dead Space: The death scenes in the first game are certainly enough to qualify, but in Dead Space 2, they just get worse. Examples include getting ripped apart like a ragdoll, or a giant needle being shoved into your eye. Poor Isaac...
  • The Deception series are made of this. The number of possible cruel deaths would take pages to list. Some mundane ones include knocking an enemy into a wall fan to watch them get chopped up, sending them flying into a brazen bull to get cooked alive, shoving them under a giant guillotine blade, feeding them to a mechanical alligator, and so forth...
  • Poor Sakuri in Demonophobia is regularly subjected to horrific deaths during her traversal of Hell itself; among the numerous ways she can die include being decayed alive by toxic clouds, having her skin ripped off, and being pulled feet-first into a meat grinder. And to twist the knife, she eventually remembers every last one of them.
  • Due to its Darker and Edgier nature, Digimon Survive has a lot of gruesome deaths. Two notable examples are Ryo in Chapter 3 and Shuuji in Chapter 5. The former went far into Sanity Slippage until the Kenzoku grabbed him and tore him apart and the latter's abuse towards Lopmon led him to dark evolve into Wendigomon who became uncontrollable and eats Shuuji. If you hear closely, you can hear Wendigomon chewing.
  • Taro and Hanako are eaten alive off-screen in Disgaea 2's worst ending. Notably, international versions removed the audio to make it less Squicky... and arguably made it worse as it's now unclear what's happening to the two.
  • Stanley the Bugman in the arcade version of Donkey Kong 3, where after he falls unconscious from Donkey Kong's rampage, the bugs invading his greenhouse suddenly swarm him and devour him alive, leaving nothing but Stanley's spray gun behind.
  • The adventure mode of Dwarf Fortress allows for a combination of Cruel and Unusual Death and Ludicrous Gibs. Obok Meatgod, who was on his way to being a Memetic Badass, is renowned for causing these.
    • Obok has now gone from a Memetic Badass to an Unperson thanks to one particularly cruel death inflicted on an elven child: He made her fight to the death against another child, and when she "won", he proceeded to rape her until she bled to death.Note So horrified were the readers that this story played a huge part in the deletion of a thread dedicated to cruel and (debatably) funny things the players did.
  • The Loathsome Dung Eater in Elden Ring is a Serial Killer Hated by All for doing this to people as a hobby. He's infamous for torturing, mutilating, and "defiling" his victims and their corpses so badly even the gods want nothing to do with them, rendering them Barred from the Afterlife. And he's done this to thousands over the years.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • From the series' backstory comes Pelinal Whitestrake, the legendary 1st Era hero of mankind/racist berserker. Believed to have been a Shezarrine, physical incarnations of the spirit of the "dead" creator god Lorkhan (known to the Imperials as "Shezarr"), Pelinal came to St. Alessia to serve as her divine champion in the war against the Ayleids. When Alessia and her army were too struck with fear to attack the White-Gold Tower occupied by Ayleid leader Umaril the Unfeathered, Pelinal charged in himself and defeated (though could not kill) Umaril before he was slain. His body was cut into eight pieces by the Ayleids to mock the Eight Divines. His head was left behind and discovered by Morihaus, with whom he had one final conversation that is now lost to history.
    • In Oblivion, during the Siege of Kvatch, many people are killed in violently cruel ways by the invading Daedra, if the gore left behind is any indicator. One victim was St. Jiub the Eradicator, the Ascended Extra Ensemble Dark Horse from Morrowind. All that is left of him when you find his "corpse" is a severed head with a large chunk of his skull missing and a look of sheer terror on his dead face. Whatever the Daedra did to him, it wasn't pretty. (For added cruelty, Skyrim's Dawnguard DLC reveals that they also soul-trapped him, condemning him to an eternity of wandering the bleak Soul Cairn.)
    • Skyrim has an off-screen example from the Great War between the Empire and the Aldmeri Dominion. When the Empire crushed the Dominion at the Battle of the Red Ring, Emperor Titus Mede II captured the Aldmeri general, hung him from the top of the White-Gold Tower, and kept him alive for thirty-three days. On the thirty-fourth day, he finally expired and was carried away by a winged daedra. Given that this general was responsible for the sack of the Imperial City and related atrocities... He kind of deserved it.
  • This trope appears often in the Fallout series, especially the first two games. The "Bloody Mess" trait makes every death cruel and unusual. Besides, there are the Lieutenant, the Master, Frank Horrigan and (sweet zombie Bird Jesus!) the Overseer from the first game.
  • Fatal Frame features numerous such deaths throughout the series.
    • In the first game, the central Ritual involves tying ropes around the Virgin Sacrifice's neck and limbs, which are then pulled tighter and tighter… until she's torn to pieces. After the mansion fell under the Curse, victims suffered a similar fate.
    • In the second game, the rituals are centered around causing as much suffering as possible. One involves systemically torturing the victim before throwing them into a hell gate. The other? One twin has to strangle the other to death.
    • In the third game, the ultimate fate of Priestesses is either to be Flayed Alive if they fail... or to be crucified if they succeed. The punishment for breaking the Kuze Code is also crucifixion.
    • In the fourth game, a 6-year-old girl died as a result of experimental surgeries, with her diary describing her suffering greatly before finally succumbing. She describes her "head-turning red", her hair falling out, and crying bloody tears.
    • In the fifth game, lesser sacrifices and men rejected by the "brides" had their limbs broken. This allowed them to be stuffed into a water-filled box while still alive…
  • Fate/Grand Order:
    • EMIYA Alter inflicts this with his Noble Phantasm, Unlimited Lost Works. First he shoots his opponent with an Origin Bullet. Shortly after the bullet enters them, dozens of swords erupt from their body.
    • Olga Marie after the conclusion of the prologue is revealed to be dead from the explosion that started the attack of Chaldea, but survived by sending her soul to rayshift along with the protagonist to Singularity F. The mastermind of the attack, Lev Lainur, drags her off from the Singularity and throws her into the copy of the Earth's soul Chaldeas, which right then was a molten slag of magma because of the Incineration of the Human Order caused by the aforementioned attack. This poor woman's soul is burning in literal hell for all eternity and in the anime First Order, we see from the front-row seat how she was drowning in the scorching liquid fire as she screams for help.
    • In the SE.RA.PH chapter, Mabel Macintosh was locked inside a battle royale between Chaldea personnel, chased by her crazed coworkers, before she was shot by the above-mentioned EMIYA Alter. Her corpse was flayed by the chapter's Arc Villain, Kiara, who would then prance around in her skin as a disguise to fool the protagonist.
  • Anyone killed by Alma in First Encounter Assault Recon. Doug Holiday, and later Jin Sun-Kwon are mangled and thrown around like Garry's Mod puppets by invisible monsters. Half of The Squad in FEAR 2 endure a similar rag-doll treatment before being shredded by black spectral tentacles. The Delta Force escorts get off lightly - Alma just liquefies the flesh off their bones.
  • Gears of War:
  • Inspector Cabanela can die this way in Ghost Trick if the player Ghost Swaps the bullet that was supposed to hit him with a nearby helmet mid-flight. The Pigeon Man says it best: "That didn't go well."
  • God of War allows you to inflict this on the Greek Gods themselves.
    • Special note goes to how Kratos deals with Helios in God of War III, viscerally tearing off his head with his bare hands right square in front of the camera as an interactive QTE. Not even Mortal Kombat goes into such detail in showing how brutal it is to remove someone's head with one's hands.
  • Golden Sun: Dark Dawn has Volecheck planning to execute two prisoners by boiling them alive… as a public execution at the full moon festival. One of the condemned is a little girl. Even some of the city folk actually look forward to this event. Luckily, your party manages to prevent this from happening.
  • Grand Theft Auto V: One of the missions has the player fighting enemies in a slaughterhouse. Some of these enemies are standing in front of machinery and will fall into it when you shoot them.
  • Guild Wars 2 minimizes the horror by not showing the gore, but most of the player stories get hit with this from the word 'go'.
    • If a human street rat doesn't save their friend Quinn, they'll hear later how "half of him was in the lake and a half was in the fountain."
    • If a Synergetics asura chooses revenge over the rescue, the Inquest murders Pol by throwing him to an incinerator golem.
    • A Sylvari going up against the Green Knight has the option of beating him to death with an enchanted hammer.
    • All charr players messily lose their entire warband (and their leader, too, if playing Ash or Iron) to Ascalonian ghosts. And to make matters worse, said leader gets brought back as a grotesque shambling zombie.
  • The Happyhills Homicide: The Clown's bread and butter. Each tape where you play as him as you prepare and carry out creative ways to get the poor victim gruesomely disemboweled, burned, stabbed, and/or dismembered.
  • Let us count the ways the player characters in Heavy Rain can die, shall we? Take a power drill up a very sensitive place, fall into a trash compactor while handcuffed to your car, have half of your body run over by a crane, being stabbed in the crotch with a katana or getting hit on the head with a plasma TV or sledgehammer.
  • Hitman rewards players with offing their targets in creative and ironic ways. To name just a few examples: gassing a bioweapon-developing scientist to death in her lab, drowning a rogue Interpol agent in a slurry pit filled with liquid fertilizer, poisoning a Corrupt Corporate Executive's eyedrops, pushing a drug kingpin into his pet hippo's pool to be Eaten Alive, and burning a secret society leader alive in a phoenix effigy.
  • Hotline Miami and Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number have plenty of horrible ways to go out, though at least thankfully, you’re not on the receiving end. Most of the time.
  • I=MGCM:
    • In Chapter 4 Episode 5 of the main story, Kaori is fatally injured and dies in an agonizing way after being ambushed by a demon from behind, fully voiced and completely shown onscreen. This leads to her subsequent corruption into a demon with crunching, squishing, and gurgling noises included.
    • In Chapter 6 Episode 5 of the main story, all magical heroines (only 6 out of 12 are recruited at that time) are killed after being brutally ambushed by demons, complete with a CG of their onscreen deaths: they died with opened eyes and pink blood dripping out from their dead bodies.
    • In the NSFW DX version, all the heroines' death scenes are accompanied with gorn and gratuitous rapes with horrifying transformations into demons.
  • Injustice: Gods Among Us has Regime!Shazam's death. To clarify: Regime!Superman starts by choking him. When Regime!Shazam attempts to counter by summoning his magic lightning with "Shazam!", Regime!Superman cuts him off by freezing his mouth and throat shut. Then Regime!Superman uses his heat vision to roast through Regime!Shazam's skull to the other side. For bonus points, he's still a child in a grown-up body.
  • Kenshi has the Peeler Machines, torture devices that slowly skin alive anyone unlucky enough to be placed in them and commonly used by factions like the Skin Bandits.
  • Any of the death cutscenes in The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II. The runners, stalkers, and clickers tear out the player character's jugular with their teeth, and the bloaters grab them by the head and pull their jaw apart with their hands.
  • League of Legends has over 150 playable characters with distinct movesets allowing for many, many ways to defeat your opponents, but the crowned king of cruel and unusual finishers has to go to Urgot's ultimate ability: "Fear Beyond Death". The ability starts with him launching an enormous drill bit into an enemy, and if they're below a maximum health threshold, Urgot may execute them by pulling them in with chains into his mechanical cyborg belly, grinding their body to mulch using his giant buzzsaw-like gears. The game doesn't show any blood, but it really pushes the game's T-for-teen rating, especially as it causes the enemy to not even leave behind a corpse.
  • Legacy of Kain:
    • Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain gives you several lovely options for inflicting deaths like these on your enemies (or even random villagers), with "suck the blood out of their wounds from 10 feet away" being the most mundane. Other highlights include instantly flaying their flesh from their bones, and crushing their bodies into the size of a marble.
    • Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver gives us the horror that is Melchiah's "Death by spinny blades of doom that descend on you from the ceiling."
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, a hapless monkey is accused of kidnapping the Deku Princess. Her father tortures him for a confession by repeatedly dipping him into a pot of boiling water. Each time Link visits him, the monkey gets dipped again. Do this too many times and the monkey is boiled to death.

    M-Z 
  • MadWorld:
    • To go into detail, while you can inflict some very esoteric deaths on normal enemies (catapulting to the moon, snapping someone's neck a whole 180 degrees, shoving a street sign through their face, or hitting their head off with a golf club, for instance), Jack takes care of the bosses in even flashier ways. Most of the bosses are killed with their weaponry. Here are all the methods used by Jack to eliminate the bosses:
      Little Eddie: Savagely thrashed with his own Epic Flail, which is then used to completely crush his head.
      Jude the Dude: Shot repeatedly until literally nothing of him was left. A removed version had Jack shove his guns up his ass before shooting him into the sky.
      Von Twirlenkiller: Punched into the sky with one of his arms, then shredded to bits by landing in his own severed wind turbine arm.
      Rinrin: Eaten by a large animatronic statue.
      Shogun: Impaled through the crotch by a spiked roof fixture. (Alternatively, bisected by his dual chainsaw.)
      Yokozuna: Used for fireworks and then incinerated by landing in an erupting volcano.
      The Shamans: Chained to Jack's bike and dragged along the ground.
      Frank: Killed by his hand-cranked electric chair.
      Elise: Spanked hard enough to send her flying through a window.
      Kojack: Exploded by his bike.
      The Masters: One is impaled by Jack and forced to use his powers to toss the other around, and then they're thrown together and kind of explode.
      Martin: Also exploded.
      The Black Baron: Used for Man Darts.
  • The fate of those taken by the Collectors in Mass Effect 2:
  • Max Payne 3: The Cracha Preto horribly murder Marcelo Branco by necklacing, partly out of sheer cruelty and partly out of trying to pin the crime on the favela gangs. Victims of necklacing executions can live for over fifteen minutes after ignition.
  • Metal Gear:
    • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Colonel Volgin dies when he gets struck by lightning, set on fire, and the bullets in his bandoleers go off causing little chunks to be blown out of his body. The death is so graphic that EVA, who Volgin raped and tortured, has to turn away, and even Snake seems disturbed by it.
    • In Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Blade Mode allows you to slice your opponents to ribbons. The main purpose of this is to slice them open so you can rip out their spine. You can have a single human-sized opponent land in 1000 pieces if you want (which even the tutorial makes abundantly clear, and by the end of the game, you're pulling the same thing on a giant robot, using its giant arm-sword to do it; Platinum Games makes some crazy stuff), and the game gives you a handy counter to track just how many bits you've mauled them into (although, yes, it's inefficient to employ that level of overkill, and blade mode does specifically encourage decapitation in a single stroke, followed promptly by a forceful spine extraction).
  • Metroid:
    • Death by the titular Metroids. These latch onto their victims with their larger mandibles and suck out their life force with the smaller ones, leaving behind a brittle husk that will collapse into dust with even the slightest bit of physical force against them.
    • Metroid Prime:
      • On the Frigate Orpheon in the prologue, we have cases such as Space Pirates having their joints fused by acid (and leaving them paralyzed) or having their internal organs eaten by parasites while they were still alive.
      • One of the Pirate Logs reveals that the Pirates tried to make their version of Samus's Morph Ball. For context, the Morph Ball is a Power Suit ability that allows Samus to compact her body into a sphere one meter in diameter without any apparent lasting physical harm. However, no one knows how it works (and the species that invented it is allegedly extinct), and the prototypes for the Pirate version ended up crushing the test subjects to death.
      "Aran's Power Suit technology remains a mystery, especially the curious Morph Ball function. All attempts at duplicating it have ended in disaster: four test subjects were broken and twisted when they engaged our Morph Ball prototypes. Science Team wisely decided to move on afterward."
    • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes:
      • There are examples of some Federation Marines accidentally getting gassed to death with insecticides (which were meant to protect against giant predatory insects), Luminoth prisoners being used as target practice for young Warrior Ing, and one Luminoth soldier starving to death while holding their post.
      • The beam combos are unusually brutal. The Sunburst essentially boils down to firing a miniaturized sun at your enemies, and if they aren't incinerated by a direct hit, they will be set on fire by the rays and eventually burn to death. The Darkburst creates a rift to a dark dimension that sucks in enemies like a black hole while ripping them apart molecule by molecule. The Sonic Boom fires a faster-moving projectile that creates a crack in the fabric of reality when it hits a target.
    • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption:
    • Crocomire in Super Metroid gets backed into a pool of acid and has its skin melted off while it's still alive. What's also horrific is that it survives long enough as a skeleton to get out before dying.
    • Metroid Fusion: X Parasites are one of the most dangerous creatures in the cosmos and for good reason. They can infect any creature through even the tiniest pore in their skin, attack the creature's central nervous system, and spread throughout their body, eating them alive from the inside out while absorbing their DNA and memories. Samus would have died this way at the beginning of the game had the Federation not given her vaccine made from the cells of the last Metroid (as they were made by the Chozo to be the X's predator), and while her Power Suit may have prevented her from immediately dying, the infection was enough to put her in a coma.
    • Raven Beak, the Big Bad of Metroid Dread, goes down really hard. First a raging Samus digs her fingers into the side of his face and drains the crap out of him with Metroid powers, causing his ship to crash. An X Parasite promptly infects and turns him into a shambling combination of him and Kraid which Samus quickly dispatches with his own Hyper Beam. Then she vaporizes the X containing his genes to ensure he can never, ever come back and his whole planet blows up just for good measure. Granted, though, he more than had it coming.
  • Mortal Kombat and every other fighting game with fatalities in it exist by this trope. Even characters that are supposed to be the good guys show remarkable cruelty in finishing their opponents.
  • Naughty Bear has this as part of the gameplay, being the Spiritual Successor to Manhunt. One example is slamming a teddy's face into a spinning turntable.
    • The sequel, Panic in Paradise, really turns up the violence. A lot of the mission targets require a Karmic Death.
      • Shove your victim onto a saguaro, or maybe you'd prefer tossing them onto a bamboo fountain?
      • Throw them to the fluff-eating plants or to the Threatening Shark’s and dolphins, which also come in aquatic versions.
      • Shove them into a cookie-cutting machine and watch the slicers go crazy with your victim's body…
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 brings you its Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies ending, in which Bishop and Qara have their skulls literally smashed open by chunks of the falling ceiling.
    • This is assuming they had high influence and thus were not killed via crossbow bolt to the throat.
    • Earlier in the game, Shandra gets set on fire and blasted to pieces by her own grandfather.
    • In the expansion, you can inflict this on numerous people by sucking their souls out and eating them.
  • Ninja Gaiden II (2008) is full of this, cranking the violence from its predecessor up, from getting your head cut off, dismembered limb from limb, or torn in half vertically OR horizontally (sometimes both) with a variety of different weapons, such as the Dragon Blade, Eclipse Scythe, Falcon Talons, Dragon's Claw and Tiger's Fang, Lunar Staff, and more. Also, the Ninpos can cause enemies to be burned alive, torn to chunks by wind blades, and more, and that's just for the Mooks. For bosses, you have plenty of facial mutilation and impalation to go around and the amount of bloodshed involved is staggering (with waves of both human blood and Alien Blood galore).
  • No More Heroes games:
    • No More Heroes features — in cutscenes — disembowelment, vertical bisection, suicide by grenade-in-mouth, another vertical bisection followed by being blown up, an Eye Scream followed by another vertical bisection performed by a huge buzzsaw, being TRISECTED, and a fist shoved through somebody's sternum (but Travis survives that last one) along with the usual beheadings and impalement. There's also Cranberry Chocolate Sundae, a Limit Break based on the concept of killing as many Mooks this way as possible.
    • No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle has decapitation, horizontal evisceration, head explosion, being chopped to pieces, arms being chopped off followed by decapitation, then having the still living head being sliced to bits, another decapitation with the same result, being stabbed through the head, the having the blade grind into the skull, machine-gunned, disembowelment, suffocation, and finally being sliced in half from diving at Travis.
    • No More Heroes III has been cut to pieces before being vaporized by a Wave-Motion Gun, skull-crushing, getting bludgeoned with a highly corrosive rock and then stabbed through the face after being cut in half, decapitation, being skewered by multiple Combat Tentacles, disembowelment, suicide by poison, melting due to stress, being blown to pieces with a laser, and being head-butted until your head explodes.
  • One of the worst ways to die in a video game happens in the Older Than the NES text adventure The Oregon Trail. One bad end you can come to is to die of dysentery. Dysentery is an inflammatory condition of the intestines caused by bacteria, viruses, parasitic worms, or protozoa. Symptoms include diarrhea with blood, fever, abdominal pain, and rectal tenesmus.note 
  • In Overwatch, a lot of the non-hitscan projectiles result in this, like getting an ice shard through the face, an arrow through the skull, or even an arrow through the eye. Even without the blood and gore, it is more than a little unnerving.
  • Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners has several of these in the form of the various punishments your companions can receive when judged. Among the most horrifying: Rin Tsukihara gets thrust and crushed through a wall by a bronze statue carrying her through like a demented Kool-Aid Man. She's then pinned against another wall with the statue's arm punching through her stomach, leading to her bleeding out before anyone can hope to help. By the way, Rin is all nine years old.
  • Phantasmagoria: Carno's murder of his wives ranges from Narm (how can someone's head be twisted 360 degrees before the neck snaps?) to absolutely horrifying (ever wonder what death by Force Feeding looks like?).
  • Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh isn't much better than its predecessor above. We've got a guy getting the shit beaten out of him, crucified with exacto-knives, his mouth stapled shut, and finally being cut open with a box cutter, another guy getting his head beaten in with a sledgehammer, another character beaten, stabbed, and electrified using her own blood, a woman getting melted down into a human pizza, and finally the main character's best friend is strangled with wires (which is, oddly enough, the tamest death).
  • In Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney, any young girl accused of witchcraft is sealed in a steel cage that looks disturbingly similar to an Iron Maiden, then the cage is lowered into a pit of flames. Just to drive the cruelty of it home, all three times this happens on-screen are FMVs, which means you see and hear their terrified begging for help until the cage closing in cuts them off. Luckily for the victims, the fire is an illusion, and the accused can leave the cage through a trap door and are carted off to a forest outside of town.
  • [PROTOTYPE]: Imagine if you please, being impaled in the stomach, pulled in, and your body rapidly and completely disassembled and sucked into the pores of your killer as all your memories are stolen and used against your friends, family, and comrades or coworkers as he uses your face to kill more people.
  • In addition to the example above, the most notable example in [PROTOTYPE 2] is the Tendril power. The primary attack attaches tendrils to the victim's legs and arms, which attach to the nearest wall or ceiling. They then pull, tearing the victim into two or three. The tendrils and the body stay where they are, meaning that you can have a room full of grisly limbs and black tentacles hanging around everywhere. No puppet jokes, please.
  • Randal's Monday: Matt is subjected to this every Monday. He keeps killing himself in ridiculous ways with his outlandish appliances.
  • In Red Dead Redemption II, Kieran Duffy, who defects from the Colm O'Driscoll gang to the Dutch van der Linde gang, is abducted by the O'Driscoll boys and has his eyes gouged out and is then decapitated by them and put on display for the Van der Lindes to see.
    • Also implied to be how Dutch's lover, Annabelle, died at the hands of the O'Driscoll gang. Dutch simply says he can never forgive Colm O'Driscoll for what he did to her, and the aforementioned death of Kieran makes it plain that they're not above torture.
    • The player is allowed to kill non-playable characters in some pretty brutal ways if they so choose. The player can do anything from hogtying an NPC and placing him or her on a train track to feeding them to an animal, to even strangling them to death.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Resident Evil 4 is not as bad as its younger spiritual cousin Dead Space right above, but still horrifying. Deaths include getting eaten alive by a giant lake monster, torn in half, crushed by a boulder, stabbed in the throat by your knife, having your head cut off by a rusty chainsaw, or even insects vomiting acid over you, melting your face off.
    • With the RE Engine's debut in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, pretty much every Game Over in the series has become this trope. Resident Evil 4 (Remake), for example, takes all of the above from the original game and worsens it tenfold. Sweet dreams...
    • Resident Evil: Gun Survivor establishes that Tyrants are created using hormones produced by the pineal glands of pubescent boys. These hormones are generated when the subject feels extreme terror. Umbrella decides that the best way to acquire the hormones is to remove the pineal gland while the subject is still conscious. So for every Tyrant that exists, somewhere, a teenage boy died screaming.
  • An early level in Rise of the Triad starts with a glass wall and a group of enemy soldiers in a wide hallway on the other side of it. The game kindly warns you of the danger of this hallway (posts lined with rapidly spinning blades, moving along interlaced tracks in the floor) by pureeing the hapless guards between the two converging rows of sawblades while you watch from your safe position on the other side of the (now-bloodied) window. See it here. Yes, that is a flying eyeball.
  • Saints Row 2 has some of these. For example, Carlos gets dragged around the city while chained to a truck; by the point the Boss gets to him, he's so injured the Boss is forced to shoot him in the head to end his suffering; there are also Jessica, who gets kidnapped and crushed to death in the trunk of her car, Shogo Akuji, who gets buried alive by Johnny and the Boss and Kazuo Akuji, who gets impaled by a katana and left to burn alive in a flaming ship.
  • The Sexy Brutale: There are your usual causes of death in this game, like gunshots or electrocution, but then there's...
    • Clay Rockridge. He drinks spider venom so potent that before he's even dead it's melted the flesh away from his mouth.
    • Trinity Carrington. Eaten by a giant spider.
    • Tequila Belle. Fatally lacerated by a window that she shattered when her singing voice hit a high note.
    • Greyson Grayson. Crushed by Spikes of Doom inside a Faraday Cage, bound via a Clutching Hand Trap so he can't escape through the trap door.
  • In The Silent Age time travelling is explained as getting all the more imprecise the farther one travels. In the most distant location, there's a corpse of a guy, that was transported right INTO the wall and never got out. Also, the consequences of getting infected by the virus are described as horrible: people getting their spines cracked in convulsions and whatnot.
  • Silent Hill 4: Multiple:
    • Walter Sullivan slits his own throat with a sharpened, prison-issue spoon. And that's perhaps the tamest death in the whole game...
    • The deaths of many of his victims, e.g. Jasper being burned alive, Richard being slowly electrocuted, Andrew being impaled and drowned.
    • It's implied the Water Prison was still holding several children when Walter's ghost came back for vengeance; the kids would have starved to death in short order when the cell doors jammed shut. The notes scattered around the place show it wasn't exactly a safe place before then either.
  • Judge Holloway got a drill shoved through her jaw in Silent Hill: Homecoming, though given what her actions were in the game, and the fact that she was in the middle of trying to use that same drill on Alex, she had it coming big time. If you fail the quick-time event immediately before this, Alex can suffer the same fate instead.
    • And Alex's father gets sliced in half down the middle by Pyramid Head.
    • And, if you choose not to put her out of her misery first, Alex's mother is slowly ripped in half by a Saw-esque death machine.
    • Failing some of the quick-time events can result in an adversary performing one of these on Alex.
  • Sleeping Dogs (2012) has a variety of environmental kills available, ranging from the pedestrian to the downright ghoulish. A few examples on the more extreme side of the equation:
    • Smashing people into air conditioning units, causing the whirling blades to turn their face a bloody pulp.
    • Knocking a victim into a counter and slamming the security gate down on them, crushing their chest. You can also do this with an engine block.
    • Cornering an opponent in the bathroom and drowning them in their piss.
    • Setting people's faces on fire with furnaces, grills, and stoves.
    • Using a chandelier to rapidly hang someone from a ceiling.
    • Impaling victims on rusty pipes, swordfish, and gibbet hooks.
    • Shoving an opponent's head into a running table saw, causing chunks of something disgusting to fly all over the place.
    • Most gruesomely, stuffing the Big Bad into a running ice chipper.
  • Soldier of Fortune. Full stop. This franchise's schtick is destructible bodies. The developers literally called it the GHOUL system in marketing materials. It could get... rather messy.
  • Space Quest:
  • Gremio from Suikoden is slowly devoured by a flesh-eating fungus. He can get better, though.
  • Spec Ops: The Line: Two words: White Phosphorus.
    • Lugo's death qualifies as well; he's lynched by angry Dubian citizens as revenge for the aforementioned White Phosphorus incident, and the blood on his body, as well as his screams from over the radio, heavily suggest he was tortured by them beforehand.
  • Bowser's deaths in the Super Mario Bros. series. Some of them include being dropped into lava, thrown into the sun, sucked up by a black hole, crushed by a dinosaur, and getting hit by a train. Of course, considering that Bowser tends to survive these fates no worse for wear, it’s debatable whether or not they count as deaths.
  • Super Meat Boy has a vast variety of deaths, including buzz saws, floating teeth monsters, salt, saws, maggots, lasers, demonic floating teeth monsters that split, and saws. And yet, special mention should be made of Dr. Fetus' death. After coming out of his suit, he is curb-stomped over and over by Bandage Girl until he is nothing but a puddle. He deserved it.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Either Galeem or Dharkon suffers one at the hands (or tendrils) of the other in World of Light's bad endings: Galeem is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, while Dharkon is reduced to a fine mist.
  • Sweet Home (1989) is filled with all sorts of death, from numerous death traps as well as the many monsters that infest the haunted house. Yamamura's death is particularly gruesome even amid this. For pushing through the barrier blocking Lady Mamiya's room, his flesh melts from his body while he's still conscious, leaving a still-standing skeleton.
  • In Syphon Filter, if you hold the taser on someone for too long, they burn to death, often screaming.
  • Beruga from Terranigma gets cut up by his own airship's propeller.
  • Undertale
    • All the game actually tells you about Chara's death is that they died from eating buttercups — what you have to research on your own is that the symptoms of buttercup poisoning are extremely nasty.
    • After realizing that Frisk is planning to kill him after having murdered every monster in the underground, Flowey begs for his life, tries to convince Frisk that he's useful and that he can help. He even goes so far as to invoke the image of his former self as Asriel Dreemurr, to dissuade you from killing him (as he still believes Frisk is Chara, the Fallen Child). Frisk, not shaken in the slightest by Flowey's pleas for mercy, repeatedly chops the crying flower in half and brutally crushes what remains afterward to a pulp. Made worse by the fact that Flowey's face begins to fall apart from each strike, his eyeball falling out and hanging from his socket as he is bifurcated and crushed at the same time. By the time Frisk finishes with poor Flowey, there is absolutely nothing left of him.
  • The Walking Dead (Telltale):
    • Pretty much anyone who's Devoured by the Horde.
    • Sarah gets Eaten Alive by a group of zombies while crying out for her family to rescue her.
    • Luke dies drowning underneath a frozen river, desperately banging under the ice while Clementine tries all she can to crack it to save him to no avail or possibly getting dragged down deeper underwater by zombies. Either way, he'll die a painful death drowning and will most likely return as a zombie permanently stuck on the bottom of the river.

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