Forced To Watch / Video Games

• In Yume miru kusuri, if Aeka is Kouichi's chosen girlfriend, a potential scene in her route includes Kyouka getting her minions to pin down Kouichi and force him to watch Kyoka's boyfriend rape Aeka. They get free and almost kill her.
• In Baldur's Gate, the corrupt Flaming Fist leader, Angelo Dosan, isn't afraid to kill one of your companions if you insult him while you're being arrested.
• Batman: Arkham Origins: During the climax of the "Cold, Cold Heart" DLC, Ferris Boyle, after freezing Batman and incapacitating Mr. Freeze, dismisses Freeze's pleas to restart the cryogenic machine and save Nora, stating that he'll keep Freeze alive just long enough to watch her die before he kills him. Fortunately, Batman breaks free from the ice and subdues Boyle before that happens.
• Castlevania:
  • The instruction booklet for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night explains that Alucard's mother, Lisa, was a doctor who was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake. The nightmare Alucard has when he uses the fake save point in the Underground Caverns reveals that he was there, but Lisa begged him not to save her, saying in no uncertain terms that it was too late for her.
  • In the bad ending of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, Soma Cruz is forced to watch his love interest Mina Hakuba be killed. He... doesn't take it well, to put it lightly. Then the good ending reveals it to be a Fake Kill Scare, so his potential Face–Heel Turn is All for Nothing.
• In The Darkness, the eponymous Eldritch Abomination does this to Jackie by using its Combat Tentacles to hold him back while Paulie Francetti executes his girlfriend Jenny. THEN it lets go and scares off the villains. And then it cruelly mocks Jackie.
• DmC: Devil May Cry: Near the climax of the game, when Kat is arrested by the Feds, Dante, trapped in Limbo and unable to save her, can do nothing but watch helplessly as the SWAT team shoot her in the shoulder and beat the ever-loving shit out of her.
• In Evil Genius, you defeat one of the superagents by mangling her teddy bear.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy XIII, Orphan forces Fang to watch him torture Vanille in order to get her to transform into Ragnarok and kill him. Fang ends up transforming into an incomplete Ragnarok but turns back into a human before she can kill Orphan. Then Orphan proceeds to torture Fang while Vanille watches. Who knows what would've happened if Lightning and co didn't pull a Big Damn Hero moment.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: Delita witnessed the death of his sister Tietra at hands of Argath.
• Fire Emblem:
  • While he doesn't get to see how it happened, Cormag from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is forced by Valter to have a long and good look at his murdered brother Glen's mangled corpse. What Valter didn't say, though, was that he was the one who killed Glen.
  • In Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Lucia is captured by the Crimean Rebels and about hanged in front of Queen Elincia, with the intention of forcing the Queen to surrender the throne. Lucia remains calm and keeps reaffirming her Undying Loyalty to Elincia, even as the rope is around her neck. And then... cue the Big Damn Heroes by the Greil Mercenaries.
  • Invoked in Fire Emblem: Awakening, when Gangrel takes Emmeryn to be executed in a cliff near Plegia Castle so he can force Prince Chrom and his Badass Crew to watch how she will die if Chrom doesn't hand the Fire Emblem itself to Plegia. Emmeryn thwarts this via willingly throwing herself off to her own death. This actually ends up working against Gangrel, since seeing a leader willing to give up their own life to try and prevent further bloodshed shocks the Plegian people and soldiers into a revolt against him since he'd been The Caligula up until that point. (If the player has [SpotPass], it doesn't stick).
• Galaxy Angel II: In the final game of the trilogy, Eigou Kaiki no Toki, Herea and Serena, the leaders of the Will, capture Kazuya's chosen Angel and trap her inside a tank in order to force her to watch how they kill Kazuya in front of her. This is necessary for them because they want her to become Serena's new avatar, and they can't possess her unless she crosses the Despair Event Horizon. It backfires when they try to impale Kazuya with a light spike that causes him to drop Roselle's pendant, which gives him the strentgh to drive Herea out of his body and save Kazuya's Angel before she breaks.
• Gene Troopers has the part where the player hero, Johanssen finally reunites with his daughter, Maureen, only for Ithaka Wassali to reveal herself as the controller of the parasites and has infected Maureen with one of her creatures. She then proceeds to seal herself and Maureen inside two separate force-fields, before ordering her minions to kill Johanssen while making the paralyzed Maureen watch.
• One of the bad endings of Hijikata's route in Hakuouki has Kazama threatening to hurt Chizuru in front of Hijikata because, he declares, he's heard that humans suffer more watching someone they care about get hurt, and he wants Hijikata to suffer. When Hijikata responds by throwing down his sword in surrender, Kazama tortures him to death in front of Chizuru with the specific intention of teaching her not to defy him.
• At one point in Kingdom Hearts II, Donald and Goofy are captured by a bunch of Heartless while Sora is unconscious. When he comes to, he encounters a "Heartless Commander", who then tortures the two with electricity after Sora makes a snarky comment on his status. Sora instantly surrenders to save his friends, and all three of them are thrown in prison.
  • The scene is recreated in the manga adaptation, but Sora is the one who gets tortured, while his friends watch in complete horror.
• Knights of the Old Republic: Admiral Saul Karath eventually manages to capture the heroes and starts grilling the Player Character for information. He already expects that his Cold-Blooded Torture isn't going to work very well if he simply uses the painful electrocution on the PC themselves. However, he has both your potential love interests in similar torture chambers...
  • Do note that if you do give in fully, he points out that he already knew everything you've told him. So he's doing it for shits and giggles.
• In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Agahnim waits until Link has arrived in his attempt to rescue Zelda before he banishes her, and does it while Link can only watch helplessly.
• Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes: Skull Face uses Chico's crush on Paz to his advantage by making him watch as he has her tortured and gang-raped. On one hand, she's a mass murderer. On the other hand, Skull Face tortures Chico even further by forcing Chico to rape Paz. Basically, Skull Face is teaching Chico about this horrible torture... and makes him prove what he learned by forcing him to do it.
• Octopath Traveler: Primrose watched her father being murdered by three men in front of her when she was young. Then when tracking down one of the men, Helgenish kills her Only Friend Yusufa in front of her.
  • In the the sequel Harvey captures Osvald's family, frames him with their murder, and has him get a life sentence so he would be forced to watch him successfully find the ultimate magic. Later, when Osvald finds him in Montwise, he gleefully shows Osvald his now-brainwashed daughter Elena and takes her away for further research. Fortunately, Osvald finds Harvey in time to stop him from hurting her daughter further, and eventually learned the One True Magic from The Power of Love.
• In the Rival Schools sequel Project Justice, if the Taiyou team is chosen, midway through the route Kurow tells a captured Hinata that he will force her to see him and his group kill Kyosuke and Batsu, who have come to the rescue. It doesn't happen: the Hopeless Boss Fight finishes without any deaths, and Hinata is rescued by Tiffany and Roy before its end
• Shadow of the Colossus has an unintentional and absolutely heart-rending example given that the Colossi are Ambiguously Evil at worst and a Designated Villain at best; From the top of Malus, the final Colossus', head, the player can see every beam of light created when a Colossus is slain, meaning that Malus had to watch as you systematically murdered every one of its kin. It's no wonder that they're so enraged at you by the time you arrive to fight them.
• One bit of Flavor Text in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri notes that the one man tough enough to endure The Punishment Sphere broke pretty quickly when they threatened to put his wife in.
• Sonic Lost World: Eggman invokes this while ranting at the Deadly Six for their rebellion, vowing to "destroy everything they love and make them watch." Later happens to Sonic, who can do nothing but watch helplessly over the Miles Electric as the planet-draining machine sucks the life out of Knuckles and Amy.
• In Stellaris, if you choose to go down the Psionic path and link yourself to the Shroud, you may encounter an entity calling itself The End of the Cycle. Making a deal with it gives you MASSIVE bonuses for about 50 years... but when that time is up, your entire empire is wiped out in an instant. Your planets will become uninhabitable beyond all terraforming, your fleets will be destroyed, and all of your leaders will be killed, save for one, who manages to evacuate a handful of pops to a planet named Exile. In your former capital, an entity named The End will spawn, comprised of the souls of your entire population, with one million fleet power at the bare minimum. This entity will systematically make its way through the galaxy, wiping the floor with every single other empire, deliberately saving Exile for last. Oh, and if you wanted to ask for help with beating it, you won't get it. Every single other empire now has a permanent -1000 diplomacy modifier against you, equivalent to what the game's genocidal empires have with everyone, so on the off-chance that they do manage to beat The End, they'll be turning their fleets to Exile next in order to get their revenge on the idiots who nearly doomed the entire galaxy.
• A major driving force in Luca's rage-filled insanity in Suikoden II is that he was forced to watch his mother be gang-raped for an entire week by Jowston Alliance rebels when he was a child. And when he finds out the kidnapping and gang-rape was all orchestrated by the mayor of Muse and leader of the Jowston Alliance Council, Darrel, he resolved to wipe the City-State off the map and murder all its inhabitants.
• Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny was one of the first to use this trope. If you are captured by Lord Blackthorn, you are asked one of the mantras to the Shrines of Virtue. If you refuse, Lord Blackthorn will drag a companion under a swinging blade and ask "are you sure you don't want to tell me?" If you continue to refuse, your companion will die and will never return. You can exploit this to get rid of Saduj, however.
• The Walking Dead
  • Inverted. When Kenny is preparing to kill Carver, Sarita and Luke try to usher her out. Clementine can choose to stay and watch, even asserting her position. When Kenny starts smashing Carver's face in with a crowbar, Clementine starts off wincing and averting her gaze, but quickly settles into a cold glare as Carver's face turns into mush.
  • A cut audio file from has one of the season one survivors, a high school student named Ben Paul, explaining that after the outbreak, he took refuge with his classmates inside their school for a period of time before he eventually found your group and that he was forced to watch as one of the girls was gang-raped to death by bandits.
• In the runup to the World of Warcraft expansion Battle for Azeroth, Sylvanas Windrunner is leading an army to invade the great tree Teldrassil, where all the night elves live and the location of their only city. One of the defenders, mortally wounded, asks her why and tells her "You cannot kill hope." Sylvanas calmly says, "Can't I?", turns the dying woman's face towards the Tree - and snaps "Burn it!" at her underlings. Even her most loyal lieutenant Nathanos Blightcaller has to be ordered a second time because no one can believe what they're hearing.
• A particularly sadistic version comes from Xenoblade Chronicles 3. After defeating Ouroboros, the Consul N chooses not to execute the party but rather imprison them and force them to wait until one of their members Mio runs out of time and reaches her Homecoming, informing them that those that reach Homecoming after their full 10 years are removed from Aionios' cycle of rebirth, meaning she'll be gone forever. They're then left for a month, separated from Mio by a single wall as her days tick down to her last, with Noah in particular destroying his knuckles after trying to punch his way out every day. When the day finally comes, they're forced to watch as her Homecoming is treated as a grand celebration by Agnus, and as the final nail in the coffin N releases Noah so he can perform his duties as an off-seer right as Mio fades away to nothing. It becomes much worse when it's revealed that N is Noah, or rather a previous incarnation of him, who when through the exact same pain of watching his Mio fading away, and N just wants to make him suffer as much as he has. Thankfully his Mio, the Consul M, had traded bodies with Mio before the party was captured, flipping the situation on it's head as it becomes N who just watched his wife die and making him suffer as he wanted Noah to.
• One was at the very end of Xenosaga 3, Wilhelm tortures Shion to try and get KOS-MOS to activate Zarathustra. It doesn't work of course because KOS-MOS decides she simply wants to be herself instead of someone else so she destroys the key to Zarathustra, making it spiral out of control. Woops. Everything gets better though.

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