Human Sacrifice / Video Games

• Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs: We find out there is an actual, tangible power to be obtained from human sacrifices, but the ones who found out, the Aztecs, weren't able to really get the scale needed to get anything significant, or at least useful to our villain's purposes. But it just happens that in more advanced ages, the whole process can be mechanized and industrialized... let's just say, a good chunk of London's population is never seen again.
• Arrogation: Unlight of Day have the sacrifices practiced by a Japanese cult which took control of the Yunlin village and ordered the population sacrificed to their pagan gods. You can come across the aftermath of their rituals in several areas, from skinned human bodies hanging from ceilings to piles of skeletons and dismembered limbs and a circle of badly-burnt human figures around a campfire, most of them still standing upright... it isn't a pretty sight. The game's climax sees you trying to prevent your sister from becoming the latest victim.
• Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: One arc late in the game has Eivor encountering a community that still practices this, Wicker Man style. The current king's pretty okay with the idea. However, if he's still alive by the time the arc ends, his attempt at maintaining his dignity on the pyre fails pretty quickly. Being burned alive is not a pleasant way to go.
• This is the purpose the Bhaalspawn in the Baldur's Gate series are meant to fulfill. Sired by the dead god of murder Bhaal who had foreseen his own death, the countless Bhaalspawn each possess a sliver of divine essence. Their only purpose was to die — something made easier by all of them struggling with murderous instincts and being Doom Magnets — and thus release their essence. Then Bhaal's former high priestess Amelissan could harness the essence and revive Bhaal with it. Even the player character helps the plan along since he is forced to kill some of the last and strongest Bhaalspawn (other than himself/herself of course) near the end of the series. Ultimately the plan fails, because Amelissan harbored ambitions of godhood for herself.
• Henry almost becomes one in Bendy and the Ink Machine, thanks to Sammy Lawrence.
• Black & White and its sequel allow you to require them from your villagers or throw people into your altar fires yourself for a burst of prayer power, if you don't mind a fast slide down the Karma Meter. In the first game, the most useful sacrificial victims are the youngest ones...
• Vella (originally nicknamed Sacrifice Girl) in Broken Age is part of a ancient ritual where villages offer young women to a massive monster in order to prevent it from destroying them. Only the villagers seem far too happy over the proceedings and actually compete with each other over who has the best "feast".
• In Capella's Promise, the village of Distana has to feed someone to the dragon, Vritra, in order to keep it from destroying their home. Strangely, a wolf managed to serve as the last sacrifice to weaken it for the party, making the entire situation come off as an Idiot Ball if any living creature, including monsters, would make a sufficient sacrifice.
• In Crusader Kings II, Norse and Aztec Pagans engage in this, earning Piety and Prestige (game currencies) by doing so. The Norse have a Great Blot festival where prisoners are sacrificed, while Aztecs use it more like an execution method. The 2.6 patch similarly allows defensive pagans (Baltic, Finnish, Slavic, and West African) and offensive Tengri pagans to offer human or monetary sacrifices to the ancestors for a random chance of getting a boon.
• One of Cult of the Lamb's main mechanics is sacrificing your loyal cultists to the Lamb's patron god, the One Who Waits, or ritualistically murdering spies of the antagonists, the Four Bishops of the Old Faith, and keeping their "heretic's hearts." The Lamb gains boons from the One Who Waits to help run the cult or use the hearts for upgrades. Alternatively, there's the "Ascend Follower" ritual, in which is effectively a more benevolent way of sacrificing followers that earns you Loyalty (XP for Followers) and Faith (Cult Morale).
• In Dark Devotion, some cultists perform a sacrificial ritual to summon the Child of the Limbo, the game’s first boss.
• In Dark Souls, the Way of the White captures and sacrifices undead to fuel the First Flame. If you go with the Rekindle ending, you sacrifice yourself this way.
• A purely technical version occurs in Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War: Winter Assault. The Imperial Guard's basic infantry units have Commissars, who can kill a random member of the unit in order to cause a fear-induced performance boost in the rest.
• One of the Story Breadcrumbs emails you get in Death Stranding mentions human sacrifices being done in the ancient past via live burial to ensure that a bridge stays up. This is a blink-and-you-miss-it moment that could easily be attributed to the weirdness of the setting and the willingness of email correspondents to spill their feelings to Sam, until your delivery package to reconnect Edge Knot City is a BB pod strongly implied to have a human infant inside.
• Diablo, being a quite demon-heavy Dark Fantasy series, naturally features this a lot. It's a common practice of the various demon cults and other followers of the Seven Great Evils, and some of the more despicable human villains, such as Archbishop Lazarus, Maghda, and Adria use human sacrifice in order to further their goals.
• In Digimon Survive, the group learns that Digimon were once worshipped as gods, with ancient people sending their children to the Digital World to appease them. When the group ends up in the Digital World themselves, the Big Bad and its minions seek to sacrifice them believing it to be the key to preventing The End of the World as We Know It.
• Dead In Vinland potentially has a couple of rare heroic (or antiheroic) examples if you recruit Gudrun and have Moira become her apprentice. They can Mercy Kill a dying mook as a sacrifice to the Norse gods; then the very elderly Gudrun asks Moira to sacrifice her as a means of passing down her power to the next generation. Depending on player choice, Moira can go through with it. She ends up with the "Human Sacrifice" trait for the rest of the game; this heals her Sickness and Injury meters every night, but significantly damages her Depression meter every night as well.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The now-extinct Ayleids (Wild Elves) of Cyrodiil enslaved the Nedes (ancestors to most of the modern races of Men) and inflicted vile tortures upon them. In some cases, as mentioned in the Adabal-a, they sacrificed their slaves to appease their various deities.
  • Hagravens, a species of flightless harpy who were once mortal women that performed a ritual to trade in their humanity for access to powerful magic. A human sacrifice^note Though they're not so picky as demanding an actual human (Elves or Beast Folk will work all the same). is required for the ritual to even become a Hagraven, and Hagravens serve as Evil Matriarchs to Reachmen clans as well as generally being an Enemy to All Living Things. Naturally, they have feathers, beak-like noses, and talons for fingers and toes.
  • One known cure for Lycanthropy requires bringing a human sacrifice to the Glenmoril witches coven. The witches will kill the sacrifice, infect the sacrifice's flesh with the disease, and the resurrect the sacrifice. The original Lycanthrope must then kill the sacrifice a second time, which will also permanently destroy their inner beast.
  • In Skyrim, starting the Daedric Prince Boethiah's quest requires sacrificing one of your followers. (The reward for completing the quest is one of the best legendary armor sets in the game.)
    • Skyrim also employs a variation of the trope as a cure for vampirism. While no actual creature has to be dragged to the ceremony, you must provide a filled black soul gem to the performing priest, and since only sentient beings like men and mer have black souls, you invariably pay for your return to life with the life of another person. This is more an example of an offering instead of a real sacrifice, though, seeing how any black soul counts, and there's a literally endless parade of Asshole Victims for you to soultrap that nobody will ever miss, least of all the Player Character. Unfortunately, this has been the plan of those who control all Black Soulgems in the first place, knowing that those who seek a cure or some other power will inevitably send them more souls to drain. The eldest of Vampires and these Ideal Masters have been at each others' throats for centuries, as the former's plans involve slowing the flow of sacrifices.
• The Oracle in Fahrenheit possesses anyone for a sacrifice to find the Indigo Child.
• In Far Cry Primal, the Izila tribe practices human sacrifice, and various sites where they do it can be found around Oros, including one that looks like an intact Stonehenge.
• Four of the five Fatal Frame games have the failure of one of these being the reason the area you are in is haunted. In order:
  • In the first game, the Rope Shrine Maiden was a girl/woman who had to be violently ripped apart by ropes in the Strangling Ritual in order to maintain the seal on the Hell Gate beneath the mansion. One of these girls, Kirie, fell in love with a man who was then killed by her family, resulting in her becoming depressed and causing her Strangling Ritual to fail to seal the Gate.
  • In the second game, the village had to perform the Crimson Sacrifice Ritual, which involved taking sets of twins down to the Hellish Abyss, and having one of the twins kill his or her sibling. One set of twins, Yae and Sae, attempt to run away before their ritual. Sae is caught and sacrificed alone, which fails to appease the Abyss.
  • In the third game, a Tattooed Priestess has to undergo several rituals in order to seal away the sadness and despair of her worshippers, with the final one, The Impalement, resulting in either her eternal slumber or her demise. During Reika's final ritual, she watches the man she loved die right in front of her, which causes the Manor of Sleep to be engulfed in The Rift.
  • In the fifth game, the priestesses of Mount Hikami are sealed in boxes to hold back the Black Water of the other world, with a special few given arranged 'ghost marriages' so that they'd draw power from the thought of being Together in Death with their betrothed. Ose Kurosawa, however, realized in her last seconds that she wanted to be together in life, and her emotions made the ritual go haywire.
• A subtle one in Final Fantasy X: this is essentially how Aeons are created, they are the dreams of the Fayth. A Fayth is a person whose soul is — willingly or else — sealed in a special kind of statue, they are essentially dead. One of the Fayth is a little boy.
  • Not so subtle in Final Fantasy Tactics, The Lion War is a massive human sacrifice to awaken Ultima the Bloody Angel. And it works, though not before Hashmal tosses his own life force into the proverbial altar.
  • At-your-face in Final Fantasy XIII: This is the plan fal'Cie have for the entirety of humanity. A last-minute Divine Intervention prevents the plan from succeeding, though at an unbelievably steep price.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, this is how the Witches are created. It's especially bad since it also shows that some of them, like Rinea and Sonya's sister Hesta, were not that willing to go through it.
    • The Vain Sorceress Nuibaba is said to kidnap and sacrifice pretty Rigelian girls to keep herself young and beautiful. A cute Cleric rescued from her Abode confirms it when spoken to. It's believed in fandom that, if the player confronts and kills the Black Knight Zeke before facing Nuibaba, his girlfriend Tatiana (whom Nuibaba keeps prisoner) suffers this fate. And probably the aforementioned Cleric and a female NPC that's also found there. Even more, she also wants to sacrifice a "Brand Bearer" like Alm or Celica, thinking it will grant her immortality.
    • Towards the end, The Dragon Jedah pressures and tries to mind rape Celica into sacrificing her soul to free the sealed goddess Mila and cure the madness of the god Duma. Celica is this close to willingly sacrifice herself, since her quest to liberate Mila had next to no clues until them, but when she questions Jedah's intentions directly, he forcibly turns her into a Witch.
  • In the Jugdral games, Genealogy and Thracia 776, the Loptr Church (and before them, the Loptr Empire) had a "project" named child hunts, where kids between 7 and 13 would be kidnapped from their families. Many of these children would be sacrificed to Loptous while others would be forced to fight amongst themselves in arenas, with the surviving children crafted into nobles that would be few more than pawns of The Empire.
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening, the Grimleal sacrifice kidnapped maidens to Grima. Much later, the combined efforts of the Grimleal-fueled dark rituals and the will of the Hierophant/Future Grima result in the citizens of Plegia sacrificing themselves en masse at the Dragon's Table. As a direct result, Grima is revived at the height of his power and free to rampage across the world.
• Fishing Vacation: In endings A and D, it's revealed the uncle killed his wife and daughter to be sacrifices to Sedna, the Inuit ocean goddess. It's implied he lured the player character and their friend to the cabin to also be sacrificed, though he only succeeds in sacrificing the player in Ending D.
• The voodoo cult in Gabriel Knight 1 does this, with the police investigation of the discovered results being what draws Gabriel into the events of the game in the first place.
• A few are required in God of War at various points.
  • God of War: to open one door in the Temple of Pandora, Kratos must burn a man alive (which manages to get under his skin).
  • God of War II: To reach the Fates, one must sacrifice himself after reading the incantation to do so — and since Kratos has a translator doing the reading...
• Gwent: The Witcher Card Game: The Ritual Sacrifice card triggers all deathwish effects on your side of the board, in its art Brewess is leading the children of Velen to the sacrifice.
• Horizon Zero Dawn: The Carja Sundom used to sacrifice people to the Sun, combining the practice with Gladiator Games in the famous Sun Ring. Then the Derangement started, with the machines becoming more aggressive and dangerous. The thirteenth Sun-King, Jiran, went mad and desperately tried to appease the Sun with ever more human sacrifices. The Red Raids, where they attacked every nearby tribe for slaves and sacrifices, went on for almost twenty years until Jiran's son Avad raised a rebellion against him and killed him.
  Avad: He truly thought of himself as a Sun God. His mind was... broken. He believed that blood sacrifice would solve... well, everything.
• A random event in Humankind has you chose either human sacrifice, or to substitute animals or perform no sacrifice. The Aztec culture special building lets you do this also, trading population for several turns of improved happiness.
• In I am Setsuna, a virgin needs to be sacrificed every hundred years. The object of the game is to escort the emponymous Setsuna to the ritual site.
• In King of Dragon Pass you can sacrifice thralls to gods in return for learning miracles and hero quests, though the same can be achieved through the sacrifice of cattle and goods. One must also be careful about which god you choose to appease this way; Humakt, the god of death and Maran Gor, the mother of earthquakes respond positively to human sacrifice, Chalana Arroy, the goddess of healing is more likely to hurt your clan's magic for such a faux pas.
• The King of Fighters 97 features this trope in one of its Multiple Endings. In the New Face Team end, the Life Energy gathered by the NFT isn't enough to fully resurrect Orochi... so Yashiro solves it by murdering both Chris and Shermie, then killing himself while telling Orochi to take their lives and energies for his Awakening.
• In King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, a sect of Druids that Alexander stumbles across capture him and attempt to burn him to death over a bonfire as part of their Rain Festival. It actually works, in an odd way, as Alexander only survives because beforehand he had prepared magic water that needed to be boiled to produce rain, thus fulfilling the festival's need, putting out the fire, and convincing the Druids he's a powerful nature wizard.
• Kirby Star Allies begins its endgame by having Hyness sacrifice his three generals, and then himself, to resurrect his "Dark Lord" Void Termina.
• Legacy of Kain: This is done by the Hash'ak'gik cult to their (or others'?) firstborn.
• In the Blood Magic mod for Minecraft, the largest amount of Life Points is gained by killing Villagers with the appropriate method.
• In NetHack you can sacrifice corpses at an altar to gain favor with your deity. If your deity is good or neutral this is a bad idea. If your deity is evil it will summon a peaceful demon.
• Re:Kuroi: The village in Act 15 sacrifices people to a dragon in order to stave off its wrath and gain its blessing. In reality, they mistook a hot spring geyser for a dragon and most of the sacrifices survived, only to wander to far off lands because they don't want to be accused of disrupting the status quo.
• A couple of quests in Romancing Saga involve Virgin Sacrifices; in one case, the player can actually abandon the poor girl to her fate, leaving the quest unfinished and earning major points with the evil gods. On top of this, the player can actually engage in this themselves by venturing into the Netherworld, meeting Death, and sacrificing one of their own party members in exchange for power. Notably, Death always takes the second character in the party, which basically means he's targeting whoever you've been traveling the longest with...
• Late into the endgame of Shin Megami Tensei IV, a quest pops up to investigate the residents of the Tennozu area, who, contrary to the hellish conditions of the rest of Tokyo, are very well fed, insisting to the visiting investigators they're living on beef stockpiles. Aside from that, the only thing of note is the local cult's devotion to Gozu-Tennoh. It's actually Baal, whose lackey is inspiring the people to continue the old sacrificial ceremonies of the past with the small difference of replacing the sacrificed cows with humans. And when confronted, unleashes his full power as The Dreaded demon of Gluttony, Beelzebub.
• In The Shrouded Isle, Chernabolg demands one member of a noble house be sacrificed to him every three months. He often asks that someone who harbors a specific major sin be the victim. However, selecting too many from one house will incite a rebellion, ending the plsythrough.
• Both the Silent Hill cult and the Shepherd's Glen cult in the Silent Hill games practice human sacrifice.
• In Six Ages, the outlaw god Uldak offers large numbers of cows in return for the sacrifice of a clan member. The rest of your pantheon does not approve of you taking him up on it, however.
• The Rite of Forfeit and Rite of Feasting in Solatorobo both require one; Elh is not happy about this fact.
• Spelunky allows players to sacrifice to Kali humanoid enemies such as cavemen, Man Eating Plants, yetis, Cultists, and damsels that you could have rescued instead. Granted, sacrificing a live maiden gets you a lot of favor from Kali.
• In Sword of the Stars II: The Lords of Winter Zuul Heralds need to consume countless slaves with high psionic potential over long periods of time before they can summon a Suul'ka. And of course, the "gods" are quite hungry when they're awoken from their centuries-long sleep, to the tune of depopulating a planet.
• A big point in Tales of Symphonia is dealing with this. Partly due to a not-so-evil-evil-being that's redealt with in the sequel at first, then it hits really close to home for The Hero.
• Has shown up in one form or another in all three Team ICO Series games.
  • ICO: Ico himself is bound and left to die in a haunted castle due to his horns being seen as a curse.
  • Shadow of the Colossus: Mono was apparently sacrificed due to a cursed fate shortly before the story starts.
  • The Last Guardian: Plays it less straight than the other two. The "chosen ones" are not intentionally sacrificed by their communities, and in fact people fight hard to save them, but should their kidnapping succeed the Big Bad converts them fatally into some kind of energy for its own mysterious purposes.
• Stellaris: The "Necroids" DLC allows Spiritualist empires, and megacorps, to take the "Death Cult" civic, allowing them to sacrifice POPs every five years for high empire bonuses.
• This, of all things, is present in Terraria. Quote from The Guide: "In order to summon the keeper of the Underworld, you have to perform a live sacrifice. Everything you need to do so can be found in the Underworld." Little does he realise that what drops down there are Guide Voodoo Dolls...
• Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader:
  • You'll be fighting a lot of Chaos cultists, and this is how almost all their magic and summoning is done. done.
    • Kunrad Voigtvir sacrifices three crewmen on the bridge of the ship to set the stage for the Justified Tutorial's boss battle. Edelthrad von Valancius attempts to stop him—and Adelard attempts to stop him because he's being Too Dumb to Live^note Though in fairness, he's already succumbing to The Corruption so he's probably screwed either way.: he runs right into the Magic Circle and gets turned into a Warp spawn.
    • You can see a particularly nasty bit of aftermath of this in a prison during chapter one: a bunch of prisoners who didn't cooperate with the Chaos cult were killed to power their magic.
  • An Imperial version happens when Cassia, a Navigator, attunes to the ship in order to pilot it through the Warp. At the start of the ritual she (non-fatally) takes blood from her valet to use as paint, but then the psychic energies unleashed wind up killing the rest of her servants. Vigdis suggests this is how such rituals usually go: the same thing happened with the late Navigator whom Cassia is replacing.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Jedoga Shadowseeker attempts to sacrifice a mook to an Eldritch Abomination. If the players can't kill the mook first, the boss Turns Red and can easily kill everyone.
  • Humanoid sacrifice is also a widespread custom of the demons, Old Gods, and loas followers.
• In Zork III: The Dungeon Master, if you touch the table while its indicator shows "IV" in the Scenic Vista, you'll end up in a temple of some courtyard where the hairy bums perform some Human Sacrifice ritual on you by plunging a knife into your heart. This later becomes a plot point in Enchanter: the same hairy ogres make a sacrificial ritual in the castle's temple, and you are chosen as soon as you enter. And for good reason, too: it is necessary to get the sacrificial knife in order to cut the ropes that bind the jeweled box shut that contains the MELBOR spell... provided that you survive getting sacrificed with help from the OZMOO spell.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest II: Hargon, leader of the Shadowtime cult, offers himself as one to Malroth after you defeat him.
  • Dragon Quest III: Jipang is terrorized by Orochi, who demands a regular sacrifice of young maidens. Upon confronting the beast, you learn that Jipang's leader, Pimiko, is actually Orochi, explaining her attitude.
  • Dragon Quest VII: Queen Fertiti's attempt to have a Sphinx/Likeness of the Great Spirit built attracted monsters to their land, which then overtook the project and converted it to a statue of the Demon Lord. When they demanded a girl to be sacrificed, the Queen went instead.
  • Dragon Quest VIII: By the time the heroes first engage the Dragovian Lord, he decides that the party has come to offer themselves as Human Sacrifices.
  • Dragon Quest XI: When you return to Hotto after the destruction of Yggdrasil, the village is preparing to sacrifice one of their own to the volcano. You can learn that in previous years the sacrifices had always been of food, like grains. Miko said a human sacrifice was necessary this time but kept the reason a secret from the village. That reason is that her son, Ryu, had turned into the dragon which had been attacking the village after it was slain by them. Miko, searching for a cure for him, was willing to do anything to keep him alive.

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