Moral Event Horizon / Video Games

"What happens here today, will change the world forever. Nothing can stop this."

"After you walk into a village and you see 50 children, all sitting neatly in a row, against a church wall, each with their throats cut and their hands chopped off, you realize that the creature that could do this doesn't have a soul."

— Niko Bellic, Grand Theft Auto IV

Moral Event Horizon in Video Games.

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Video Games with their own pages

• Criminal Case
• DC Video Games
• Digimon
• Final Fantasy
• Fire Emblem
• Grand Theft Auto
• Hitman
• Kingdom Hearts
• Nasuverse
• Pokémon
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica
• Ratchet & Clank
• Sailor Moon
• Shin Megami Tensei
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Star Trek
• Star Wars
• Tales Series
• Tolkien's Legendarium
• Transformers
• Until Dawn
• World of Warcraft

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A - D

• Ace Combat:
  • In Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, Yuktobanian special forces infiltrate Osea and unleashed nerve gas in Bana City, and try to massacre everyone, including civilians, at Apito International Airport. Later in the game, the Yukes tried to bomb a stadium full of civilians, and Chopper died trying to protect them. Anyone would be pissed from these, even though the Yukes aren't the ones who started the war.
    • The ones who were actually behind the war, Belka, cross the line when it is discovered they have hijacked the Arkbird, the so-called "Bird of Peace," and intend to use it to drop nukes on Yuktobania from orbit, for the sole purpose of prolonging the war. When you manage to chase the Arkbird down, they change their objective from attacking Yuktobania to diverting to the nearest landmass and detonating their entire nuclear payload to catch as many civilians in the blast as possible, purely out of spite for their plan being thwarted.
  • In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, even though it was hard to tell whether the Allied Forces or Belka was the good guys, an Allied bombing of the city of Hoffnung in Belka was just plain evil, and as a result, Pixy betrays the Allied Forces.
  • Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation: The Estovakians using the Chandelier on Gracemeria, for the sole purpose of leveling it, civilians and all.
  • The Hamlet special forces unit from Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception unleashes a biochemical agent on the innocent city of Santa Elva in order to kill civilians. It's a bit hard to feel sympathetic for the Leasath military after that.
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown brings us the two Erusean splinter factions, the Radicals and Conservatives, who, when global communications collapse, immediately begin fighting amongst themselves and targeting anyone who is not on their side, including civilians. The Radicals specifically target their country's own crown princess simply because she was no longer of use to them as a PR figurehead to drum up support for the war. The Conservatives initially seem to be the good guys, but then turn out to be not so different when Osean forces on Tyler Island discover the bodies of civilians, including children who had been executed by the Conservatives.
    • The DLC gives us Matias Torres, a charismatic but few-guns-short-of-a-Stonehenge Erusean Captain who initially seems ready to cross the MEH right off the bat by intending to nuke the Osean capital of Oured, if not for his justification that such a horrible event would end the war between Osea and Erusea, saving millions more. And he fakes his surrender to prepare the shot, taking advantage of the infighting amongst the OADF's Long Range Strategic Strike Group over whether they should fire anyway given Torres's Obviously Evil tendencies at this point, which Strider 3 "Jaeger" later points out is "the moment they quit being soldiers". However, as the battle with him drags on and his sanity begins to erode, it becomes clear his real motivations for the attack have nothing to do with ending the war but are part of his fetishistic obsession for death and carnage, and really just wants to achieve the act of killing a million people from 5,000 kilometers away for his own satisfaction.
    • Mihaly crosses it in the third level of the game when he ambushes your squadron mate Brownie, ruthlessly stalking her through the clouds and terrifying the poor pilot, taking his time lining up for the perfect shot until Brownie is screaming for help right before he finally puts her out of her misery. It makes it really hard to feel bad for him after Trigger shoots him down and injures him to the point that he can never fly again.
• It's very easy to hate Admiral Greyfield in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, although the clincher is when Forsythe, the honorable general of the enemy Lazurian Army, surrenders to him and takes responsibility for all of the bad things his troops have done. Greyfield's reaction? He kills Forsythe and captures his army, threatening to execute them all. Soon afterward, when he finds out that Brenner is helping the Lazurians escape from captivity, Greyfield carpet bombs his position, killing Brenner and all of the surrounding soldiers in his area (including many of Greyfield's own New Rubinelle forces).
• In Alice: Madness Returns, Dr. Bumby starts off simply as a Stalker with a Crush towards Lizzie, but he eventually gets worse. After he grows tired of Lizzie rejecting him, he sets her house on fire, killing her and her parents, and causing her sister to go insane. When Alice is healthy enough to finally leave the asylum, he then tries to hypnotize her, hoping to turn her into a prostitute as he had done with his previous patients.
• In the life-simulator Alter Ego (1986), there is one scenario where you are faced with a rude store manager who is too busy engaging in idle chit-chat to serve you. If you choose to react violently to being ignored, you are set upon and badly beaten by security guards and banned from the store. After this, you have the option of going all-out and committing an arson attack, burning the store to the ground, resulting in you becoming a social outcast with a criminal record, in addition to six months in jail.
• There are several opportunities for the player to achieve this in the classic RPG Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura. One involves siding with Kerghan in the finale, which immediately causes any good-aligned party members to accuse you of being a traitorous bastard and attack you. Kerghan then tasks you with killing off his demonic competition in The Void, before finally helping you wipe out all life in Arcanum. Depressing stuff indeed.
• Spoofed in Armed and Dangerous: King Forge's men take over a retirement home. This is seen by everyone as a horrible act, while it was actually done because one of the heroes moved a sign.
• The Player can cross this in Armored Core: For Answer with the mission "Destroy Cradle 03" — a mission that has you destroy 5 "Cradles", huge flying cities housing 20 Million people each. Your progress through the mission is kept track of by Old King saying how many people you have killed, ending with the staggering total of 100 Million. The next mission comes from a case of What the Hell, Hero?, and 4 of the game's major characters come after you in a final, semi-heroic last stand (5 on Hard Mode, with the 5th being the female lead of the game), that will, ultimately, because you are the main character after all, end with you coming out victorious. And then, the game states that you go on to destroy the rest of the Cradles, and go down in history as the greatest monster mankind ever knew. Did we mention that most of what's left of humankind is living in those cities?
• While most of the Templars in Assassin's Creed are Asshole Victims, they are generally Well Intentioned Extremists who genuinely believe in doing what's right. But there are moments where even their flimsy excuse went too far.
  • In Assassin's Creed, when it was revealed that Majd Addin not only didn't even believe in the Templar cause, he only joined them so he could get away with rape and murder.
  • Rodrigo Borgia in Assassin's Creed II crossed it even before the start of the game once players looked up his profile about his past. If not, then there's him hanging Ezio Auditore's family, including his young brother.
  • Cesare Borgia of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood killed his own father by suffocating him with a poisoned apple (for trying to kill him with it first), then yelled at his sister/lover for the location of the Apple of Eden, ignoring her realization that he never loved her. This wasn't the first time he crossed the line; he concocted a plan to siege Montenegro in Italy and murdered Ezio's Uncle, Mario Auditore. Years after Ezio defeated him, he went right back to sacking cities to reclaim power for himself. Being left falling at "The hands of fate" is his just desserts for his crimes.
  • Charles Lee in Assassin's Creed III. Killing Connor Kenway's mother while leading a raid on a small village, anyone? Subverted when it's revealed that it wasn't him, but Connor's hero, George Washington, who did it.
  • Governor Pierre de Fayet in Freedom Cry orders a slave ship sunk to prevent Adéwalé from rescuing the slaves on board.
  • In Rogue, Shay Patrick Cormac considers himself to have crossed this when he inadvertently causes the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which is part of why he defects to the Templars.
  • Assassin's Creed: Unity:
    • Pierre Bellec is the poor choice Master Assassin when he Framed Elise de la Serre by poisoning Mirabeau with aconite.
    • Francois-Thomas Germain is more violent and has more screen time than his fallen Templars, even Robespierre. He crossed it when he murdered Elise's father and framed Arno. When Arno gets initiated into the Assassins, this angered him further, despite having Arno's sympathy. When Germain is assassinated, the council invited Arno back into the Sanctum, because Arno was right about the plan (Bellec is wrong about all Branches except he was only right about Medieval, Renaissance, and Colonial Branches).
  • In Assassin's Creed Origins, Flavius Metellus, the Lion crosses it dead meat for killing Bayek's and Aya's firstborn son Khemu. What's more is that Flavius proclaims that he is a god and cannot be punished and felt absolutely no remorse whatsoever when he killed Khemu.
• In a dialogue that was originally removed from the American version of Azure Striker Gunvolt before being re-added, Deadpan Snarker and Lazy Bum Merak shows his true colors. He was willing to drown an entire base and everyone inside under his command in order to kill the main character Gunvolt. All because he would get three years of paid vacation and it would be a pain in the ass to fight Gunvolt himself "the hard way". (And this is how you establish Sloth embodiments as a threat.)
• Baldur's Gate: Irenicus would have been just unlikeable for torturing you in his lab. When he casually murders (and in at least one case, defiles the corpse of^note no, not like that; it's actually worse) two party members from the previous game and leaves you to walk through a dungeon complex full of people he's experimented on and left sealed in vats with only madness to keep them company, he becomes The Guy You Really Want To Kill.
  • Keep in mind this is after he'd already committed war crimes so horrible his own species, the usually Can't Argue with Elves, were horrified enough to exile him.
  • In Throne of Bhaal, Amellisan the Blackhearted crossed it when she guided thousands of Bhaalspawn to a "safe haven" so she'd have them all in one place when the time came for the mass sacrifice.
• Wiseman from Baten Kaitos Origins crosses it in a big way when he kills everyone in Naos, an act so evil that Seph, perhaps the best example of a Blue Oni in the game up to this point, goes completely berserk. To the point where he makes a Deal with the Devil just so that he can personally kill Wiseman.
  • Shanath isn't any better in this regard. Even as someone who had been a major pain for the entire game, he manages to take it to a new level when he rips off Gena's wings. This pisses off Sagi to such a massive degree that when it is revealed later in the game that this wasn't Shanath's idea, but Quaestor Verus's, it's treated as that character crossing the Moral Event Horizon as well. Yes, the same event counts for two different people.
• BioShock:
  • Dr. Suchong at first seems like a very slimy scientist with a Morally Ambiguous Doctorate, but no worse than any of the other psychos running around Rapture. Then comes The Reveal audiodiary: "Break that sweet puppy's neck, would you kindly?". After that, his eventual Karmic Death is fully justified.
  • The game, meanwhile, will conclude that the player has crossed the line if you kill more than two Little Sisters. So, no, by the time Tennenbaum takes you in and says there may be hope for you yet, there isn't. Given that you're killing brainwashed little girls who can't help themselves, it's justified.
  • Nearly every major figure in Rapture can be said to have crossed the Moral Event Horizon. Steinman becoming the "Picasso" of cosmetic surgery^* which, Cohen's definition of art, the whole Little Sister project.... However, while Tenenbaum does do actions that could count as crossing the line (collaborating with the Nazi prison camp, letting ADAM research go on despite being fully aware of the consequences, the whole Little Sister thing...) she still manages to appear sympathetic as she becomes The Atoner of the game.
• BioShock 2:
  • Truly special mention must be made to Dr. Sofia Lamb. The opening cutscene is you bringing your Little Sister, Eleanor Lamb, around on a gathering expedition, and being attacked by a group of splicers as is normal. Then the good Doc Lamb shows up. After her minions cast Hypnotize on you, she forces you to shoot yourself in the head. While her daughter watches in increasing horror.
  • Stanley Poole is just as bad, if in an Evil Is Petty sort of way. Unlike other villains who had some overarching goal and committed atrocities in their pursuit, Stanley just used his control to turn Dionysus Park into a center of hedonistic parties, embezzling money from Dr. Lamb for funds. When Eleanor discovered him, he kidnapped her and gave her to the Little Sister program to stop her from potentially ratting him out, and eventually became so paranoid of discovery that he drowned everyone who attended his parties so they couldn't talk. Lamb knew of his actions all along.
• BioShock Infinite:
  • The game has Daisy Fitzroy attempt to kill an innocent child, having deluded herself into believing the only way the downtrodden will be free of oppression is to wipe out all white, upper-class citizens regardless of age or gender; thankfully, Elizabeth kills her before she can act on it. Then Burial at Sea subverts it; Daisy was invoking the appearance of crossing the Moral Event Horizon, but she actually had no intention of going through with the murder.
  • Speaking of hurting children, Comstock himself, in his audio diaries, revealed that at the Battle of Wounded Knee, he personally burned down Indian tents with children inside when someone accused him of having Indian blood. This time, however, it isn't his Moral Event Horizon. Comstock's Moral Event Horizon is ironically his baptism, or more specifically, using it to avoid taking any responsibility for his actions, leading him to become even worse than he already was. Compare it to our Booker, who is forced to face what he did, among other sins, as the story goes on and, while still not a saint, becomes a better man because of it.
  • Invoked and deconstructed in the case of Booker DeWitt, who shows the kind of psychological effect such an act would have on someone who wasn't sociopathic or deluded enough to not care about it. Booker avoided Comstock's horizon by refusing the baptism, but this led to him going deep into debt through alcohol and gambling addiction, which was his alternate method of coping. To clear his debts, he sold his infant daughter Anna to Comstock (indirectly), resulting in her becoming Elizabeth. Booker immediately regrets his actions and tries to get Anna back, but it's too late. He felt so guilty about the act that he unconsciously altered his own memories so "Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt" didn't refer to something that already happened, but a command to save Elizabeth to atone. The belief that they have done something irredeemable causes this character considerable distress and influences them to become a Death Seeker when Booker realizes the Awful Truth.
• BlazBlue:
  • It's difficult to say when, exactly, Terumi crossed the line. It could've been the first time we saw him, when he cut off Ragna's arm; Mind Raped his little Brother, Jin; kidnapped his little sister, Saya, to use as a cloning template for the Murakumo Units; murdered the nun running the orphanage that they were living in and burned the orphanage to the ground for good measure, all while loudly mocking and laughing at Ragna who was bleeding out in the mud. Or it could've been when he, almost a century before the incident at the orphanage, created the Black Beast that ravaged the world for years, joined the Six Heroes to defeat it when he realized it couldn't be controlled and then betrayed them, killed Nine, Kokonoe's mother, when she learned about his involvement in the Black Beast's creation, as well as Trinity Glassfille, by using the love Trinity harboured for the man he was currently possessing as a way of manipulating her into lifting Nine's geas on him, whereupon he tossed them both into a Cauldron. As it turns out, it was causing the Prime Field War, an event which kickstarted the entire plot of the series by causing all of humanity and the entire world to be destroyed, all out of pure pettiness and spite towards the Amaterasu Unit for not allowing him to have freedom. Being the original will of the Susano'o unit, he allowed his body to be discovered by humans and simply let their worst aspects be their undoing as their hunger to at long last have the power of the gods consumed them.
  • Relius transformed his own daughter Ada into a Nox Nyctores, and left her half-finished with his son Carl. This while knowing full well that "Nirvana" actively eats Carl's emotions and drives him into madness. He then used the experience to do the same to his wife, Ignis.
  • For some, Kokonoe's experiments on Lambda and her hand in the creation of Ignis are seen as crossing the Moral Event Horizon.
    • Though it should be noted that, while she knew Relius wanted to make a new Nox Nyctores core, she was completely unaware that it required the sacrifice of human souls until the plan was already underway, and she couldn't do much to stop it with the NOL beating down her door and the miniature Black Beast killing everyone. At one point, she even talks to a deactivated Lambda and admits that she's gone past the point of no return.
• Bloodborne: The DLC, The Old Hunters, focuses on going through the past of Byrgenwerth and the Healing Church to find out what their true Moral Event Horizon crossing act was (all the horrible, irredeemable stuff they did in the main game doesn't count because they were already past the event horizon when they did it). The first section shows the consequences of the beast/hunter cycle; the Old Hunters prowl the Hunter's Nightmare attacking anything they find, and the founders of the Healing Church are stuck there as hideously mutated beasts. But that isn't the MEH. The next area, the Research Hall, shows that in their attempts to ascend they turned humans into emaciated, insane creatures with massive, bloated lumps of meat for heads (and for a few, they are all horrible bloated head-lump, no body to be found), but this isn't the MEH either. No, that's the final area, a small fishing hamlet that worshipped the Great One Kos. The Byrgenwerth hunters found the hamlet, massacred and experimented on its inhabitants, and killed both Kos and her unborn child. Because death isn't the same for Great Ones, Kos cursed them in revenge so that everyone responsible for the massacre and everyone who inherited their legacy would go crazy and be trapped in the Hunter's Nightmare.
• Borderlands 2: If Handsome Jack didn't cross the line with his murder of Helena Pierce, his experimentation and murder of Bloodwing made him utterly irredeemable, and served to make players hate him even more. But he would go on to cross the MEH even further than that in the mission "Where Angels Fear to Tread". His horrific treatment of his daughter Angel, to the point where she wants to die, is revealed; after the Vault Hunters Mercy Kill her, Handsome Jack appears and shoots Roland In the Back, killing him, and taking off with Lilith. You'll want to jump into your TV and gut the bastard yourself after playing through this level.
  • During the Clan War quest chain for Ellie, both Mick Zaford and Papa Hodunk / Tector cross it during their quest lines by hiring the Vault Hunters to do outright horrific things to the rival clans (burning people alive in their homes and massacring a family as they mourn the loss of a loved one). Even before that, the ECHO logs in the dust show that Papa and Mick did horrible things that turn a small problem into a brutal war — mainly, Papa Hodunk kidnapped some Zaford children and drowned them to death and Mick Zaford raped Papa's wife and may have ate her. By the end, you don't know if Mick, Papa, the Vault Hunters, or Ellie have crossed the line. It really shows how something as simple as a bar tab and a bet over a stock race can make people monsters. Or maybe it's just Pandora.
• In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, the player characters are mercenaries working for future Big Bad Handsome Jack and thus get a front-row seat to several actions that could count as his personal MEHs. Of particular note is him spacing four scientists that have done nothing but help him due to the off chance that one of them might be a spy. This moment convinces Moxxi, Roland, and Lilith that he has to be stopped. And he makes you push the button.
• Lord Yuna of Breath of Fire IV at first appears to be a simple officer of the Fou Empire's forces. He doesn't even appear to be as evil as some of the other members of the army (CoughRassoCough). Then, you learn near the end of the game that not only did he kidnap Elina (as opposed to all the times he told your group that she was no longer in the Empire), but he has forcibly genetically modified her body into that of a god, though one rendered immobile because her organs grew large enough to consume a building. The worst part? The entire point of this operation was so that he could use her as a source of ammo for the Carronade, a terrifying weapon that typically sacrifices the life of a person to fire a devastating Hex shot that leaves entire cities uninhabitable. The more physical and emotional pain the victim is put through before being sacrificed and the closer their connection to the target, the stronger the hex. His aim was to make Elina immortal so he could brutally torture her without her dying so he could fire the strongest shot possible at her kingdom. The game's ending hints that he goes on to create even more monstrosities like what he did to Elina.
• The Big Bad of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Khalid Al-Asad, is obviously a psychotic terrorist, but crosses this line when he detonates a nuclear warhead in his own country. Captain Price makes sure Khalid pays for it by blowing his brains out when he gets captured.
• In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, General Shepherd's moral event horizon will undoubtedly go down as one of the most horrifying scenes in video games, or any medium for that matter: A Big Damn Heroes moment turns into his Face–Heel Turn when Shepherd shoots the character you are playing as (Roach), shoots fan favorite Ghost in the face at point-blank range for trying to respond, and has his black-coated troopers throw you and Ghost into a pit, pour kerosene all over your bodies while he watches, smoking a cigar, and then ignites the kerosene by throwing his lit cigar at it, burning you alive. Thankfully, in the final battle, Soap tears out a knife stabbed into his chest — that Shepherd put there — and throws it right at the sorry guy's eye, killing him with an Eye Scream.
  • You, the player (or at least one of the characters you play), cross the Moral Event Horizon during the famous level "No Russian." Masquerading as a Russian terrorist to infiltrate Makarov's gang, you and he march through an airport and slaughter hundreds of civilians with automatic weapons. General Shepherd tells you in the mission briefing "This will cost you a piece of yourself," and he is not joking. Even though you do have the option to not shoot the civilians (you can either not shoot at all or purposely shoot over their heads), it doesn't excuse the dozens of SWAT cops you gun down on your way out. Your character does, however, get his just desserts immediately thereafter — it will take the rest of MW2 and 3 for Makarov to get his.
    • And the kicker is you can't even prevent the massacre by gunning down the terrorists instead because doing so gives you a Non-Standard Game Over.
    • You can skip the level, though (even during the level itself), and the game reminds you of this several times leading up to the event itself.
  • Plus one in Black Ops, and how. During one of the Vietnam levels, you hear a recording cementing the bad guys as complete, irredeemable monsters, wherein one mentions the effectiveness of the evil phlebotinum Nova 6 on infants. And now I must scream.
  • Makarov crosses it by orchestrating and leading the "No Russian" bit above in MW2.
    • And he crosses about 5 more during the course of Modern Warfare 3. In no short order:
    • He kidnaps the Russian President and plans to use his daughter to extort the Russian nuclear launch codes out of him, so he can turn all of Europe to glass.
    • He unleashes a lethal toxin into the streets of various cities around Europe, killing thousands of soldiers and citizens to pave the way for an en masse Russian invasion.
    • He sets a trap to kill the remnants of Task Force 141, which ends with Soap's death, and Price losing trust in Yuri for knowing Makarov.
    • As it turned out, he was the one who gave the order for the aforementioned warhead's detonation in the original Modern Warfare.
    • He levels most of Berlin to get the Russian President's daughter, and when he has her, he TORTURES her to get the Russian president to break.
    • In essence, Makarov orchestrates WWIII just to further Russia's power and for profit. If there is anyone more capable of evil, I'd like to see it.
  • In Advanced Warfare, the entirety of the prison camp in the level Captured is one for Atlas, and its CEO, Jonathan Irons. Torture, prisoners brutally beaten up by guards with exoskeletons, mass executions, deplorably small prison cells, and medical experimentation all show how Atlas unapologetically and repeatedly violates the Geneva Convention and Nuremberg Code.
• In the Castlevania franchise, there has been a fair share of villains who eventually cross the MEH. Here's the list:
  • Dracula commits multiple MEH-worthy deeds in his many appearances, usually in backstory.
  • Graham Jones in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow crosses it when he stabs Yoko in the caverns, causing Soma to call him a bastard for his actions.
  • In the sequel, Dmitrii definitely crosses it after sacrificing Celia, his own ally, with no remorse or regret in the Abyss.
  • Celia herself crosses the line when she sets up a mock execution of Mina, an innocent young girl, for the "crime" of being Soma's girlfriend, for the purposes of attempting to make him a Person of Mass Destruction.
• Cave Story: If the Doctor's manipulative plot to join the research team and serve as their medical doctor as a ploy to get his hands on the magical Demon Crown and use its powers to try to conquer the world wasn't already crossing the MEH, he definitely crosses it when he orders Misery and Balrog to force-feed Red Flowers to Toroko, an innocent child Mimiga, turning her into a mindlessly enraged creature that Quote (i.e. you, the player) is forced to Mercy Kill to put her out of her misery.
• Child of Light:
  • Queen Umbra crossed the moral event horizon before the story's current events even started, as she murdered Aurora's mother two years prior so that she could usurp Lemuria as its despotic ruler (and in Revenge for exiling her own mother from Lemuria years ago) — stealing the sun, moon, and stars from the sky in the process — before marrying Aurora's father when the story begins so that she could murder her enemy's daughter, a child of approximately eight years with no knowledge of her mother's past. Aurora's soul is sent to Lemuria as the result of her mother casting a protective spell over her before her death, somewhat foiling this plan. However...
  • Queen Umbra's youngest daughter Nox/Norah manages to be even worse, at least on a personal level. She is so twisted that she establishes a close bond with Aurora as her incredibly loving and caring older stepsister... all for the purpose of gaining the little girl's love and trust to exploit for her own benefit, gleefully unveiling the sadistic monster that hides Beneath the Mask when she deceives Aurora into entering the tampered Magic Mirror to the Forgotten Tower where she and her mother try to kill her. Nox's heartless betrayal as Norah emotionally devastates Aurora, and can hit the player hard too because of the temporary time she spent as an "ally" before showing her true colours.
• Chrono Trigger:
  • Queen Zeal crosses the MEH when she forces her own daughter Schala to help her activate the Mammon Machine to gain immense power from Lavos, which disturbs the creature's slumber and results in it killing Crono. Schala is a kind and gentle young woman who is internally conflicted by her love for her mother and the knowledge that her mother has fallen into insanity to the point that power is all she cares about, not even her own children.
  • The Chancellor to King Guardia XXXIII almost crosses the MEH when he accuses Crono of kidnapping Marle/Princess Nadia, puts him on trial, tricks the prison warden into believing Crono was found guilty even if he is found innocent, and sentences him to death by execution; but you could make the argument that the Chancellor is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who is taking his duty to protect Marle way too seriously. That is, until he later takes advantage of the strained relationship between Marle and her father by lying to her about how her mother died, telling her that her father refused to see her in her final moments and that "one could say he killed her". At this moment, it is clear that the Chancellor has no good intentions. Subverted; he's actually Yakra XIII, who has been plotting against Crono and Marle's family ever since they defeated his distant ancestor in 600 A.D.. Yakra XIII captured the real Chancellor and has been impersonating him all along, and the real Chancellor is an honest legal judge.
• Command & Conquer: Generals: the GLA's crowning moral event horizon is them using bioweapons on China's cities. That is without going into conscripting villagers before destroying a dam flooding said village, razing villages to the ground to steal UN relief funds, bio attacks on civilians, inciting mass riots to raid a hospital, then cry like someone had just slit their throat when the US and China retaliate against their atrocities.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert, the very first cutscene for the Soviets has Stalin and his cronies casually discussing the effects of Sarin nerve gas on a village of alleged dissidents. Then, just to remind you that you're one of the bad guys as well, your first mission is go massacre another village.
• While in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the Soviets are more quirky, they cross this line in the Allied campaign when General Vladimir nukes the city of Chicago, just as you won the city back.
• The Conduit ends with Adams setting off the self-destruct sequence in his base after you infiltrate it. In the sequel, we find that the explosion has destroyed D.C. and has Adams joke about how your family was in the area. Whilst commenting on how radiation is an unpleasant way to die. Jerk.
• Contra:
  • Shattered Soldier: If the Triumvirate destroying half of the world's population by sabotaging the hyper-magnetic weapons wasn't enough for them, then supposedly killing Lance Bean and framing Bill Rizer definitely did it for them.
  • In Neo Contra, Master Contra crosses it when he delivers a Hannibal Lecture to Bill Rizer, causing a Heroic BSoD, and in the same scene, if you have higher rankings, he kills Mystery G as Mystery G does a Heroic Sacrifice as Master Contra prepares to kill Bill and Jaguar.
• In the Hordes of the Underdark expansion of Neverwinter Nights, there used to be an option, if you tried a Romance Sidequest but failed, to use the intended Love Interest's true name to force them into loving you and being a Sex Slave. Their horrified and furious reactions made it clear that there was no redeeming you. There "used to" be an option, because even the creators found it too dark to keep in and dummied it out in the next patch.
• In The Darkness video game, the death of Jenny serves as a Moral Event Horizon for both Paulie Francetti and The Darkness itself. Paulie for executing her and The Darkness for restraining you as you are Forced to Watch and sadistically joking about it all.
  The Darkness: "Aww, what did they do to poor Jenny?"
  • That is, assuming Paulie hasn't crossed it already by blowing up the orphanage where Jackie grew up with a rocket launcher. With the kids inside it. Out of spite.
  • In the sequel, collectibles reveal that The Brotherhood, which was supposed to be a divine task force against The Darkness, was fucked up even before they were corrupted by The Darkness and turned into an apocalypse cult. They kidnapped the potential hosts for The Darkness, raised them as Knight Templar Tykebombs in a Black-and-White Insanity mentality, and when the Darkness Host came of age and could be properly identified, they knocked him out, strapped him to a chair, and ritually tortured him with twelve specialized surgical tools. After they were corrupted with dark essence, they became so psychotic and violent that even The Darkness can't control them. They enslave a brothel (and burn it down), shoot up Jackie's crib, forcing him to choose which of their hostages dies first, and turn his aunt into a pincushion.
• In Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, each squad has a Corruption meter, which goes up with evil actions and down with good actions (or penance). When a squad reaches the maximum level of corruption, they become "Lost to the Dark Gods" and are irredeemably evil, regardless of actions, including killing a greater daemon and saving sub-sector Aurelia again. Doing this results in a change of endings depending on how corrupt you become. The five endings are: 100% pure, become the Brother-Captain of the 4th Company; pure, become marked as a renegade by the chapter like Gabriel Angelos; Neutral, be banished to the Eye of Terror for 100 years, and on survival you may be allowed to return; Evil, be executed by Gabriel Angelos for heresy; 100% Evil, become a Chaos Lord for the Black Legion.
• Dead Island has its share:
  • The Raskols — One of Banoia's violent gangs, the Raskols decide that a Zombie Apocalypse is the perfect time to start doing whatever the hell they want, randomly gunning down and stealing from the living and the dead with equal mercilessness. The worst have to be the Raskols who take over the police station, selfishly turn it into a fortress for themselves alone, shoot at any survivors who try and approach for aid, are eventually revealed to have zombies caged up and be kidnapping survivors to feed to them, and finally, when Jin tries to be a good Samaritan and share some supplies with them, they steal them all and rape her. The characters feel no guilt in slaughtering their way through their ranks and letting the zombies have the survivors, and most players won't either.
  • Koritoia Ope — A superstitious witch doctor who embodies the worst ideas of the misogynistic medicine man; he sold his own daughter to another man as a slave to pay off his gambling debts, he locked said daughter in a tomb to starve to death for running away from that fate to the city and daring to return after getting herself educated, and he tries to beat said daughter to death as an evil spirit when he is "persuaded" to take the player characters into the aforementioned tomb. Things get even worse when we find out that he is ultimately responsible for the zombie outbreak; the first roving infected, who went on to spread the plague across the island, were his tribesmen, who caught the disease because of his giving them zombie-infected brains to eat as part of a holy ritual. Part of the reason he sealed Yerema up to die is that the infected were not as they were supposed to be. Purna shooting him dead is richly deserved.
    • He's even worse in the novel of the game: when Yerema dared to return, he ordered some of the men to ritually torture and rape her for leaving. This is how the infection first reared its ugly head; the first zombies were her rapists.
  • Charon — An international hacker-for-hire who has willingly worked with every terrorist organisation on the planet, from Al-Qaeda to the Yakuza. He's deeply involved in the zombie outbreak and is intending to take a sample strain of the virus and make a fortune by selling it as a bio-weapon. He manipulates all of the playable characters, setting the immune quartet against Colonel Ryder in the process and convincing them to help him obtain a bio-engineered super-potent strain of the virus for him, murders a scientist when he's insistent on creating a cure for the disease as well, and is unrepentant of the nightmares he will unleash in pursuit of cash.
• In Dead Rising, there is a rival photographer, who helps you learn to use the camera and has photography contests with you, but on the last day, he ties up an innocent man, and was going to take a picture of the person "Crossing into zombiehood". By the way, if you don't get there at a specific time, you'll find out he is not kidding.
  • Thankfully, the game lets you, in your metagame precognition, kill him before this even begins to happen... while he's giving you the tutorial on how to use your camera. The game still counts this as a Psychopath kill.
• Depending on the player's choices in Devil Survivor, different people can end up crossing the line. One major example is Keisuke Tagaki, who loses it after finding out that demons aren't the only threat in the lockdown and decides to deal with it by slaughtering anyone they judge irredeemable. Again, the player decides whether they've gone too far with their well-intentioned extremism, or if they want to pull them back from the brink.
• Deltarune is the Spiritual Successor to a game which argues, again and again, that everybody can be a good person if they try, and that even truly wretched people deserve compassion and mercy. So you make it to the final boss, the King, and despite everything he's done, he starts talking about his backstory and how he wants Darkners and Lightners to live in harmony. Ralsei heals him. He gets to his feet, thanks you from the depths of his heart...and then sucker-punches the heroes immediately, and moves straight into trying to kill Kris while their guard was down. Luckily, depending on your choices, two things can happen: Ralsei puts the King to sleep using a spell, or Lancer, the King's own son, shows up, overthrows the tyrant, and throws him in a cell with no plan to release him. If the latter happens, nobody, in-universe or out, complains.
  • Deltarune's version of the Genocide Route outdoes the total destruction of the universe; to achieve your objective of destroying the world, you have to mind-rape your own friends into becoming mentally-ill supervillains. The point of no return is your first Lightner murder; there is some debate whether the Darkners are actually real or just psychic constructs of material possessions, but the moment you 'convince' Noelle to use a loaded weapon on someone your character knows is a real (well, real in-universe) person, and her former friend no less...^note To twist the blade, you can also prove to her That Was Not a Dream and she did just freeze her friend to death.
• Devil May Cry:
  • From the first game, Dante considers Mundus' crossing point to be when the latter kills his minion, Griffon, for his failure. Another potential crossing point is Mundus enslaving Vergil to serve as Nelo Angelo.
  • In Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, Arkham/Jester's establishes himself as irredeemably evil when he reveals that he sired and raised Lady/Mary, his daughter, solely for the purpose of using her blood to open a portal to Hell, all because her mother's blood was what was needed to open it.
• Diablo III has several truly damning examples:
  • Maghda was originally a quite Disney-ish witch who mainly sent cultists after you and tried to beat you to the three pieces of the Stranger's Sword. When she burns the town of Wortham to the ground and then tortures and kills fan favorite Deckard Cain, that's the moment when she stops being a sideline nuisance and becomes a full-on horrific villain — and she only gets worse from that point on.
  • Adria crosses this big-time with probably the cruelest betrayal of the entire saga at the end of Act III, by using Leah, her own daughter, as the vessel for her master Diablo to be reborn as the embodiment of all seven of the Great Evils in one being, the Prime Evil, by means of the Black Soulstone that she had tricked you into filling with all seven Evils for her.
  • The Grand Maester's proclamation during the Reaper of Souls sidequest, The Templar's Reckoning, is called "damning" by Kormac for very good reason. Basically, it announces his intent to conscript every citizen of Westmarch and beyond into the Templar Order, with his Inquisitors visiting the same horrendous torture and brainwashing that Kormac and Jondar went through upon every last one of them to make them Templars. It is this proclamation that convinces Kormac that the order is beyond saving, and that both the Grand Maester and the Inquisitors need to answer for what they've done.
• From Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, there's Super Hero Aurum. He wasn't a pleasant person to begin with, killing demons and Overlords just for who they are, his latest being the Gentle Giant in charge of the Evil Academy. He crosses the horizon, however, when he takes over as the butler for said Overlord's son and messes up his perception of the human world, all so he can have a new Overlord to add to his record. He crosses it further when, just to make sure Mao doesn't relapse, he sets an Obvious Trap for the princess Mao is escorting, to make certain her "hero" bodyguard (which also happens to be his number one fan) triggers it and dies, only to drive home that Humans Are Bastards and the good ones wind up dead. In short: he messes up one kid and gets another killed just for the prospect of remaining the Super Hero and to stroke his own ego. This quote sums up everything...
  Raspberyl: What kind of nerves do you have?! It's beyond honor student level.
• Disgaea 5 gives us two examples.
  • Majorita takes control over Toto Bunny, blackmails its Overlord into lending his army to the Lost's cause (this is why Usalia's cursed), promises to relieve Toto Bunny of its burden after a hundred days, and then kills the Overlord and his wife on the ninety-ninth, before resurrecting them as zombies and starting a manhunt for Usalia, who promptly fled the Netherworld. Killing and raising Overlord Geese made Red Magnus mad with her, but learning about this and the fact that she razed his home Netherworld of Scorching Flame caused him to join Usalia in howling for her blood. Nobody in the story who knows of her atrocities likes her in any way, and the only time the party doesn't hate her outright is when Void Dark raises her as a zombie using the Overload he stole from her.
  • Void Dark is a nasty son of a bitch who is willing to kill his own minions for just about any reason, and there are reasons the party hates him, ranging from petty things like Seraphina's Arranged Marriage to personal motivators like brainwashing Goldion (his own father, if you must ask) and killing Liezerota, but it's the time that he steals the energy-absorbing Devouring Kris Overload and uses it to seed Netherworlds close to the protagonistic party with enchanted spears to drain their Mana dry that convinces the party that he needs to be stopped at all costs. He truly crosses it, however, when he kills Majorita, steals her Overload, and starts using it to raise an undead army to stall the party; not only is the party disgusted with what he's doing but the revelation that he took Majorita in and raised her solely because her Overload was useful to him caused Majorita herself to lash out in hatred against him. The party is somewhat willing to tolerate him after all he's done, as he did everything he did to fix his mistake of killing Liezerota, but when you consider that he only starts cleaning up his act after getting his malice forced out of him via Ultimate Demon Fist, Ultimate Technique: Macrocosm, it doesn't feel like karma.
• In Dog's Life, Miss Peaches is a supposedly nice businesswoman who is number 1 in cat food. But in the game, it is revealed that the new cat food brand she is releasing is made from dogs that she and her lackeys have kidnapped. And she has a huge machine that is unnecessarily long and unnecessarily brutal to kill them!
• In DoDonPachi, Colonel Longhena crosses it by sending out the player to eliminate what he calls the "Mechanized Aliens". As it turns out, the aliens are in fact the player's allies, which Longhena gleefully reveals once the game's first loop is completed.
• In Doom Eternal, if the Khan Maykr didn't make the Slayer's shitlist already by trying to get humanity annihilated by the demons, it's revealed that she crossed this long ago with her deal with Hell. In exchange for the Argent Energy needed for the survival of her world of Urdak and her people, the Maykrs, she consigns countless worlds under her rule and their people to be consumed by the demons, only allowing those who follow her to survive the culling. And that's even before we learn that the Argent Energy that powers Urdak is made of the souls of those that the demons kill and torture down in Hell, and that she's helping the demons in this process via enslaved Sentinels and her Maykr technology in Nekravol. The sheer scale of this atrocity is enough that even Samuel Hayden, the biggest proponent of Argent Energy from the previous game, is utterly disgusted.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins
    • The Dwarf Paragon Branka doesn't so much cross the horizon as fly across it, laughing the whole way. We find out just how completely depraved and insane Branka is when it is revealed that in order to reach the Anvil of the Void, she sacrificed her entire House — three hundred plus dwarves — to the Darkspawn and allowed the women to be taken to become Broodmothers (a process that defines horror) just so she could have Darkspawn to throw at the traps surrounding the Anvil. The sole survivor, Hespith, explains it in simple terms:
      Hespith: But the true abomination... is not that it occurred, but that it was allowed. Branka... my love... The Stone has punished me, dream friend. I am dying of something worse than death... Betrayal.
    • The stories of Flemeth indicate she crossed the line into irredeemability when she started stealing her daughters' bodies to prolong her own life- albeit that Inquisition puts this into a significantly less sinister light when she reveals that while she does Body Surf into her daughters, she can't do so without the host's explicit permission.
    • Arl Rendon Howe crosses it in the Human Noble origin story when he and his men slaughter his best friend's entire household, including his young grandson and helpless daughter-in-law, out of nothing more than ambition and hatred for the Couslands for opposing them when they sided with Orlais.
    • Marjolaine crosses it in the DLC Leliana's Song where the player gets to see Marjolaine's betrayal of her friend/lover firsthand. When Leliana discovers Marjolaine has been committing treason against Orlais, she confronts her about it, not because she's angry at what Marjolaine's done, but because she fears for Marjolaine's safety. Marjolaine responds later on by knifing Leliana in the gut, handing her over to Captain Raleigh to be tortured (and as strongly implied, raped), and altering the document so that Orlais believes Leliana is the traitor.
  • Dragon Age II
    • Anders crosses the line when he blows up the Kirkwall Chantry, killing the Grand Cleric and many other innocent people in order to destroy any chance of compromise between the Circle and the Templars. It's implied that he is aware of this and will allow Hawke to kill him so that the innocents he killed will also be avenged.
    • Then Meredith followed him when she used it as an excuse to annul a Circle of Magi that Anders never even belonged to. Just like he knew she would. The mages in the other circles considered this an In-Universe moral event horizon for the Templars and the Chantry. At least half of them rebelled on the spot, while the ones who didn't follow within the next year in response to the Templars' efforts to get the situation under control.
    • Then Orsino crosses it when he reveals that he knew about and protected the Serial Killer blood mage Quentin. While he downplays his crime in the Mage path, he is wholly unrepentant in the Templar path about being complicit in the deaths of several innocent women, including Hawke's mother Leandra. He even uses the fruits of Quentin's research to turn himself into a literal monster after the reveal, which, like Meredith's above, seals his irredeemability in the eyes of the Templars and only further assures the state of open war between them and Mages.
    • Mother Petrice crosses it when she murders Seamus Dumar, tries to frame Hawke for it, and plans on using the entire affair to incite the citizens of Kirkwall to rise up and wage war against the Qunari. Her apathy towards Hawke pointing out how it will be a massacre on both sides of the conflict further solidifies just how much of a deranged zealot she really is.
    • Due to the game's Grey-and-Gray Morality, a lot of Hawke's actions have some sort of justification. However, there is absolutely no excuse for selling Fenris back to his master, especially since he had been your loyal comrade for 7 years. It's so awful that almost all of your companions — who almost never agree on anything — will call you out on it.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest IV: Aamon murders Rose, thus ensuring that Psaro the Manslayer crosses the Despair Event Horizon and goes along with his plan to destroy humanity.
  • Dragon Quest V: Bishop Ladja uses the hero as a human shield in order to prevent his father Pankraz from fighting back against his flunkies, incinerates him with a fireball after said flunkies had already beaten him to within an inch of his life, and then carts the hero and Harry off to a slave camp for the Religion of Evil for ten years. Several years later, Pankraz's granddaughter Madchen, who absolutely loves monsters and wants humans and monsters to learn how to live together, comes upon Ladja and deems some monsters are plainly evil and cannot be redeemed.
• In the Video Game Remake of DuckTales, both Flintheart Glomgold and Magica De Spell went from card carrying cartoon-y bad guys to completely crossing the line when they allowed Huey, Dewey, and Louie to get killed by Count Dracula Duck. While it's true that they've both tried to hurt them in the show, letting the boys getting sacrificed to a vampire has shown they've gone too far.
• Mentioned in-universe, in Dungeon Maker II: The Hidden War, by the male main character in regards to Crimson. At first, Crimson appears to be a Manipulative Bastard at worst, with a little bit of foreshadowing that he might actually be an outright villain. Then you get to the earth ruin. In the middle of talking to a demon ghost, Crimson shows up, destroys the frightened ghost for no really good reason, then tries to convince the Dungeon Maker to murder Niko, an innocent little boy whose only "crime" is being half-witch. The Dungeon Maker explicitly states this is the point where he went from simply distrusting Crimson to outright hating him.
• Dwarf Fortress practically runs on Video Game Cruelty Potential crossing the line twice, and there's no kind of crazed brutality the player community won't contemplate. But apparently "mermaid farming" — building a pool system for captive wild merfolk so you can steal and air-drown their babies for their valuable bones — was too much for the game's creator, who massively devalued merbone in his next update so the practice would stop.
  • Another Dwarf Fortress example is the story of Obok Meatgod. Meatgod was a textbook example of crossing the line twice, until his player did something unspeakable even by Bay 12 standards and got excised from the fandom.
  • Many Dwarf Fortress players takes the view that there are no Moral Event Horizons, there are merely goals.

E - H

• In the first installment of the Eagle Eye Mysteries Edutainment Game, during Book 2's version of "Case of the Crazy Compass," the mystery's guilty party (Dave Grant) slips a powerful magnet into Alex Hane's backpack; this has the effect of severely messing up Alex's compass while he's out in the woods with the rest of his Explorer Trek club, causing him to get lost for hours and putting him at risk of experiencing the very real dangers associated with getting lost in the woods — and the perp put the magnet in the backpack knowing that Alex and his group would be going into the woods. It becomes even worse when you learn the motive for the act, as well (because Alex's science project had earlier beaten Dave's special project on magnetism), and it's especially telling that the character doesn't show up in any subsequent cases in the game's linear order.
• In one of the background books in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, an axe-fighter named Ellabeth becomes part of a love triangle. She kidnaps her rival and leaves her in a room with three doors, telling her that one door will lead to freedom, another to the guy, and the third to a demon that will kill her. That's a nasty enough revenge, right? As the woman tries the doors, it turns out there is no demon: one door is the way out, and behind the others are the two halves of her boyfriend. It's called "The Third Door."
  • In the embellished historical account of Morrowind's war with the Empire, we get a plethora of bastards merrily hopping across the MEH. The Akaviri potentate and his son gleefully plot the absolute destruction of the Emperor and his minions, callously catching innocents in their web of intrigue, while they are at peace with the Empire. A deranged Khajiit lord sets Molag Bal, one of the most sinister and cruel Daedra Lords, on a helpless town because a bard from there had told him a depressing tale. Later on, to get revenge for Lord Vivec of Morrowind blacklisting him for incompetence, a mercenary manipulates a poor bereaved girl who had been trained in witchcraft into summoning Mehrunes Dagon to destroy the capital of Morrowind. The mad Empress has her own son assassinated, and the Emperor (after being tricked into believing that his concubine was an assassin), casually remarks to her that he's going to free her, but he thinks he'll have her innocent little sister brought in as her replacement.
  • Outside of the literature within Morrowind, Lady Almalexia, one of the three mortal gods of the Morrowind Tribunal, goes insane with power and uses her reincarnated lover (whom she betrayed to his death the first time) to carry out her increasingly unsettling orders, and finally sends him off to murder one of the other members of the Tribunal based on sketchy evidence. When the player arrives, they find Sotha Sil already dead, and Almalexia arrives to try to murder you before going on to take care of Vivec so that she will be the sole ruler of the Temple.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: You'd think that the Thalmor, an entire nation of genocidal elven supremacists plaguing the continent and murdering/enslaving anyone they hate based on unfounded claims of worshiping a particular god, would be evil enough. Then Ancano, the Thalmor commissar overseeing the local university, apparently goes mad with ambition and tries to absorb the overwhelming magical power of an Artifact of Doom, which risks causing an explosion large enough to destroy the entire solar system. And as the cherry on top, you find out that the risk of a world-ending explosion was the point. The upper ranks of the Thalmor don't even like the world they've nearly conquered because they're not satisfied with being born as near-immortal ultra-powerful humanoids, and the existence of inferior life just makes them angrier. They won't be satisfied until everything, including themselves, dies and forces the Altmer species to reincarnate as fully-immortal divinities of chaos. They have banned the worship of a god they truly believe is real, because they want to starve him of belief and thus cause the total unmaking of reality itself. When Ancano found a quicker method to destroy everything, he immediately jumped onto the Villain Ball for dear life - because his fellow elites would have wanted what he dished out.
• You in Evil Genius, naturally. Most of the Acts of Infamy you can perform are of the "darkly hilarious" variety (ordering your soldiers to club baby seals on live television), or they're deeds that aren't really evil but simply plain old Trolling (ordering your minions on an operation to deprive the British intelligence of their tea). Basically, the overwhelming majority of possible evil deeds run on Rule of Funny. Several of the actions you need to perform to defeat the Super-Agents are also like this: South American agent Mariana Mamba? Give her reverse-liposuction to make her hideously fat. North American agent Dirk Masters? You dunk him into a vat of chemicals obtained by his steroid and sweat-riddled gym towel, turning him into a muscle-bound mutant. Chinese agent Jet Chan? Have him curbstomped in a rigged martial arts tournament so he flees and meditates on his defeat. See? All of these are presented as humorous and fitting, and most importantly, they are defeated in such a way that they are fine apart from their appearance or pride. Not so for the Russian agent, Katarina Frostonova. How do you defeat her? You take the only thing she has ever cared about - her childhood teddy bear - and you tear the thing to pieces in front of her and mock her for it. She flees your base in mad hysteria and it's implied that her Heroic BSoD is so profound that she's forced to be retired from service. This is notably the only evil deed that the game presents as a You Bastard! moment rather than something to laugh at.
• Killing children in Fallout and 2 sticks the player with the irremovable "Child Killer" title. Among the effects are penalties when talking to people and bounty hunters hounding you for the rest of the game (which doesn't otherwise happen unless you have massive negative karma.) Even the title description calls you an evil bastard.
  • Likewise, getting into the slave trade requires you to put a tattoo on your forehead so the rest of the slaver gang can recognize you. The rest of the wasteland also knows what that tattoo means, and it will affect your dialogue with many, many people.
• In Fallout 3, the player can merrily trip over the Horizon by erasing the peaceful town of Megaton from existence for a handful of caps and a room at Tenpenny Tower. Doing so will immediately sink your Karma meter to the lowest it can go — earning you the attentions of the Gunslinger-esque Regulators — and your pacifist father will have a very stern word to you about it later on in the story. Although this is — if you choose to do it — your Crowning Moment of Villainy, elsewhere in the game, you may enslave children (such as Bryan Wilks, as the evil resolution to the quest "Those!", or Bumble from Little Lamplight), feed a pack of lies to a gullible character which she will then publish as fact, sabotage your erstwhile home (thus forcing your neighbours out into the hands of almost certain death), and finally poison your father's own project and consign the majority of the population of the Wasteland to painful death.
  • The effect of many of your evil actions is kinda ruined, as you can erase the negative consequences of many such actions by giving water to beggars or donating to the church.
    • Actually, the very act of turning the purifier on gives you the same amount of positive karma as poisoning it does negative. So, for killing the entire wasteland population, the karma system just remains somewhat indifferent to you. If you plant the virus and send a follower in to activate the purifier, however...
    • At the end of the "Broken Steel" DLC, you can choose to use the orbital nuclear strike to blow up the Citadel (base of the Brotherhood of Steel, one of the few good factions in the Capital Wasteland) instead of the Enclave's Mobile Crawler, which makes you truly irredeemably evil, this being the last story mission of the game. The only positive outcome is a Bragging Rights Reward in the form of Callahan's Magnum, found in a safe within the smoking ruin.
  • It should be noted that if you have high karma followers, they'll mostly just go along with you as long as you stay high karma. However, there are certain things you can do in the game that are simply so awful that they'll lose it and try to take you out because you're such a monster. Charon's contract will prevent him from taking action against you, but if you release him after having crossed the horizon, he'll immediately turn on you and try to kill you. This is a game where you can be so horrible of a person, your own friends will turn against you and try to murder you.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, the player can cross this. The Moral Event Horizon might be selling Arcade Gannon into slavery, leading to his suicide or crucifixion, letting Mortimer (a high-class cannibal) use one of your human companions as the main course of a banquet, firing the Archimedes Kill Sat on the NCR at Helios One, or teaming up with the Powder Gangers to destroy Goodsprings and kill everyone in it, including the guy who saved your life. Or other things.
  • Failing "Don't Tread on the Bear", which occurs at some point in all of the non-NCR story branches, locks you out of any further NCR quests (including Boone and Cass's companion quests), and once this happens in the Legion story path, the NCR are permanently hostile on sight; they will also declare you a terrorist if you kill any of their leaders.
  • The Lonesome Road DLC allows you to nuke both the NCR and the Legion, with a quotation of Planet of the Apes (1968)'s ending if you have the Wild Wasteland trait.
  • You can side with Elijah and release the Deadly Gas cloud on the Wasteland in Dead Money, though this results in a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • Boone believes he crossed the Moral Event Horizon at Bitter Springs — ironically, this belief may be the only thing that stopped him from actually doing so.
  Boone: A murderer who does good deeds is still a murderer.
• Harlan Wade from F.E.A.R. indisputably crosses the MEH when he sends his own pre-teen daughter into the lab of the company that he works for so that they can conduct experiments on her psychic abilities. Later on, Wade decides to place Alma in a permanent coma and have her impregnated with the hope of creating first a super-soldier, then a psychic commander of a battalion of mindless soldiers. Finally, he just has the plug pulled on her. The Big Bad's murderous rage that leaves dozens or hundreds of civilians dead is a bit understandable after you learn all of this.
• Lord Brevon from Freedom Planet: if he didn't cross the line with his Cold-Blooded Torture of Lilac, he flew over it on his Cool Starship when he turned Milla into a horrific monstrosity, forcing the player to fight and potentially kill her.
• In Freedom Planet 2, it is revealed that the earth dragons descended from Bakunawa's original crew soared like a comet across the line when they activated the ship's mining laser in the middle of the water dragons' slave revolt. Several characters have a change of heart when the truth gets out - the Magister, when he finally accepts it after lengthy study in Shang Mu's library, immediately offers to apologize to Merga over it and renovates Shang Tu's government so it can operate and move on without an earth dragon (namely, himself) in charge.
• Driscoll from the Front Mission stops being an aloof and seemingly not-so-evil enemy commander and does a triple sow-cow past the point of no return when it's revealed that, after nearly half a game of searching for her, he had the main character's fiancé killed and her brain converted into the CPU for his custom wanzerl
• William Afton from Five Nights at Freddy's crossed it by committing the child murders at the Freddy Fazbear's Pizza restaurants, resulting in their possession of the animatronics of the chain and basically setting the entire story of the games in motion. His body count ranges from six to eleven or twelve.
• The Locust from Gears of War were nasty in the first place, but just in case you thought that they might actually be justified in their extreme actions (as Myrrah continually tries to pass them off as being), they skip gleefully past the Moral Event Horizon in Gears Of War 2, where they're revealed to capture humans just so they can expose them to torture so nasty, the biggest badass of a game series that's practically Made Of Badass commits suicide once he's freed.
  • The reason that Tai commits suicide is that his religion believes that the soul can leave the body before death, and this is what happened during the torture. After he was free, his body was soulless, so Tai saw no point in having earthly remains.
  • Not even humans in the military, or humans who were armed. Every human they came across, they either killed or tortured, and nobody knows why. The scene with Maria... well. It drives the point home.
• Genshin Impact:
  • While Grand Sage Azar was a highly unpleasant individual from the start, he crosses the line by using the Akasha to trap the entirety of Sumeru City in a dream loop, almost resulting in the death of Dunyarzad and likely thousands more.
  • Il Dottore crosses it before the events of the game by murdering Niwa and giving his heart to the Kabukimono, later known as Scaramouche, to manipulate the Kabukimono by fabricating a lie that Niwa killed his own servant, making Dottore indirectly responsible for Scaramouche's villainy.
  • Noailles comes off as a frustrating By-the-Book Cop at first, but he crosses the line when he breaks his agreement with Caterpillar to let Lanoire, and only Lanoire, go from the Fortress of Meropide, then states that those without documentation (which he knows applies to Lanoire) will spend the rest of their lives imprisoned. This despite knowing that Lanoire is an innocent child who's only there because she was born there. Additionally, he's deliberately bypassing the courts, and if the Traveler points it out to him, he shrugs it off. At that point it becomes clear that he's more of The Unfettered Principles Zealot.
• God of War:
  • Ares, the original God of War, crosses the MEH when he tricks his servant, Kratos, into slaughtering his own family, all while claiming They Were Holding You Back. The gods later see that he had definitely crossed it when he invades Athens just to torment Athena, which forces the gods to send in Kratos to stop Ares.
  • God of War: Ascension reveals he previously crossed the MEH in comparison to his Big, Screwed-Up Family by corrupting the Furies (formerly spirits of Loyalty) into helping him usurp his father with a prophecy of a blood-drenched demigod that would tear down Olympus for him. When his own son failed to meet up to his standards of a war demigod, he disowned him. He intentionally kidnapped one of Zeus' children, discarded him as a failure as well, then groomed the other one his whole life into - well, becoming the Kratos we all know.
  • Zeus seems to cross the moral event horizon himself when he betrays Kratos by tricking him into giving up his godly powers and then murdering him with the blade of Olympus. It's important to know that Kratos was attacking Rhodes and Zeus did seem somewhat justified in doing this, but his motives in these actions were not for the sake of the people of Rhodes and the city's safety and the well-being of Greece, but because he was afraid that Kratos was going to kill him in a cycle of patricide and take over his position as ruler of Olympus. Then he quickly vaporizes both Kratos' Spartans and Rhodes' remaining defenders with an uncaring swing of the blade. If that's not convincing enough, then Zeus definitely crosses the MEH when he destroys Kratos' hometown of Sparta and murders a lot of innocent people, just to punish Kratos and because the people there worshiped Kratos.
  • Olympus, as a whole, crosses the MEH when it's revealed that the underworld isn't shoving all the True Neutral mortal souls into the Asphodel Fields, but outright transforming them into the blood-crazed monsters that have terrorized and slaughtered thousands throughout the entire series. At this point, anything - even letting a manchild destroy all of civilization - is preferable to this hell.
  • Ragnarok introduces Odin as a charming asshole who amusingly treats the pantheon like a mega-corporation. It's almost funny to watch this genocidal tyrant act like Devin Weston with wizard powers and a stupid hat. And then he starts murdering people in impulsive fits of rage; Brok for annoying him one time too many, and Thor for not blindly obeying him during the apocalypse. Even worse, it turns out the Eyes of Odin aren't just magical constructs, but the souls of children who were sacrificed by their Odin-worshiping parents.
    • The action that best fits the narrative bill is Brok's murder. Before this utterly meaningless act of cruelty, Kratos still wanted to keep to himself and stay away from prophecies in general, given the trouble he had with them back home in Greece. Once Brok died, he decided that Odin needed to die no matter how it happened, and started to actively try to bring about Ragnarok.
• Golden Sun has Saturos and Menardi, whose plan is to revive the forbidden power of Alchemy so they can take over the world. However, their goals are noble, though never explained until the second game. The duo are actually out to save the world since the sealing of Alchemy turned the world into a literal Flat World and it is now crumbling away into nothingness. The pair tried to talk to the elders of Vale about the situation, but they were ignored and told that Alchemy should never be released. Desperate to stop the destruction, Saturos and Menardi brute force their way into the sanctum to steal the Elemental Stars needed to power up the Elemental Lighthouses to restore Alchemy. It's presumed that the pair would have used the newly released powers to conquer the world anyway and their successors, Agatio and Karst, would have done the same thing.
  • The sequel has Blados and Chalis as well as Alex cross this in the middle of the story by activating the Grave Eclipse, covering half the continent in darkness and leading to thousands of innocent deaths. Probably the worst part about this is that, unlike Saturos and Menardi or Argaito and Karst, they have no clear motive for this. For the Evulz is the best explanation.
• In Ghost Trick, Commander Sith backstabs Yomiel by tricking his spirit into leaving his body for another part of the sub, removing the Temsik meteorite, and sinking the sub. This would condemn Yomiel to an eternity in crushing darkness, completely alone without even a body to move with. And his only reasoning is that he outlived his usefulness. Since we feel a little sorry for Yomiel by this point, it doesn't feel like karmic justice.
• Palawa Joko of Guild Wars 2 has spent the entire two centuries since the first Guild Wars kicking puppies on a nation-wide level, but he vaults from "entertainingly evil" to "kill with extreme prejudice" with what he did in the timeskip to Talkhora from the first game. After torturing her and Koss to death, he decided to raise them as undead servants as an insult, but they still had enough presence of mind to defy him. So he removed Talkhora's tongue, limbs, and all but the tiniest shred of her soul from her mummified body, then left her lying on a desert plateau, unable to move or speak. For centuries. If it hadn't been for the griffons, she would have lost her mind decades ago.
• Halo:
  • The Covenant are an interesting case; as a whole, they murdered billions of humans on the word of their Prophets. However, it becomes clear that most of them are misguided, Punch Clock Villains, or outright slaves, and a big theme of post-Halo 3 media is humanity and the former Covenant learning how to live and work together. However, this is played completely straight for the three High Prophets who ordered humanity's genocide in the first place, especially when we find out that they only did it to prevent the truth from getting out about humanity's relationship to the Forerunners, which would have cost the Prophets their political power.
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved, 343 Guilty Spark is a Well-Intentioned Extremist (with emphasis on extreme); however, at the end of Halo 3, Spark murders Sgt. Johnson and tries to do the same to the Master Chief, all to prevent them from activating a new Halo meant to kill the Flood at the cost of its destruction, which would have likely resulted in them devouring all of humanity, the Sangheli, and the surviving Covenant- and from there, the entire galaxy- had Guilty Spark succeeded. This is somewhat understandable if you know Spark's background, however. Even when ignoring that he once was a human who lived about 100,000 years before the game takes place, had his mind extracted and was turned into a floating lightbulb only to have all memories of his former life locked away in his databanks and made inaccessible to him when he was made the monitor of Installation 04, i.e. "his" Halo ring, there's still the fact that he not only had basically failed in his mission to preserve the functionality of his ring but was also basically told that the replacement for his Halo was to be blown up as well even before it was finished. For an AI that's big on sticking to protocols, this was simply too much for him. Considering that — just like human-made AIs — even monitors can become rampant after 100,000 years of solitude and practically nothing to do but routine maintenance work, it's not that surprising that Spark did what he did.
• The Villain Protagonist Player Character of Hatred crosses it the instant he kills someone he drugged and kidnapped, and things only get worse from there, ultimately culminating in the overloading of a nuclear reactor, causing a massive explosion that destroys the entire city.
• The North Koreans from Homefront gleefully race across it, as demonstrated in the opening level when they shoot a screaming child's parents and possibly shoot him.
• In Horizon Zero Dawn, crossed by Ted Faro many, many years before the events of the game. As if it wasn't bad enough he unwittingly doomed all life on Earth with a biomass-eating robot plague, he then also sabotaged the system humanity built to reseed the planet with life, purging the APOLLO subfunction intended to educate the new human population and killing all of the GAIA Alphas to stop them from fixing it—in so doing, destroying all knowledge of the past civilisations, forcing the people of the future into a pre-industrial (pre-agricultural in some cases) Future Primitive existence. All because he didn't want to (rightly) go down in history as the man who singlehandedly fucked over the entire world with his carelessness and stupidity. It shouldn't surprise you that "Fuck Ted Faro" is a rallying cry among the player base.
  • Horizon Forbidden West: Zenith may not have been responsible for the apocalypse, but they manage to cross the MEH out of sheer narcissistic elitism. First, they knowingly allow Ted Faro to leave a backdoor in the system which he ultimately uses to erase the collected knowledge of mankind and murder the team that built the archive, then they attempt to steal a copy of the system for themselves, potentially compromising its location to the machine swarm which was actively consuming the planet. Then they fake their deaths in space, ensuring the doomed population of Earth believes their last hope of the human species surviving the apocalypse has died with them. Then they unlock biological immortality for themselves, but instead of building a new world with the zygotes and seed stores aboard their ship, they use their immortality to stagnate for a millenium living out fantasy lives in VR. Finally, their 'paradise' comes undone when they torture an artificial intelligence, which turns on them, destroys their colony, and ultimately attempts to destroy the only safe harbor they had to flee to. That last one is revealed to be the reason for everything that has happened in the past twenty years on Earth.
• A House of Many Doors: The House's ultimate prize requires a sacrifice that cements the seeker as a mass-murderer; to consume the fruit from the Trees of Life and obtain immortality, you must destroy an entire world. The rulers of the Seven Cities consumed this power and became demigods, but have been tortured in their own ways by the sheer monstrosity of the act afterwards. At the end of the game, you and some of your crew may choose to do the same...
  • ...And then Judith, if you chose to bring her along, will gleefully request to perform the sacrifice over and over until it can't be done anymore, killing more people than anyone has in human history for the sole purpose of ensuring nobody else will ever get to claim the prize; that's right, she's so monstrously narcissistic that she will gleefully slaughter entire worlds of people so she can claim credit for being the last person who can ever claim the prize.

I - L

• In inFAMOUS, the player is given a karma choice. Either destroy the Ray Sphere and become a hero to all, or activate the Ray Sphere and become so evil that you can never be redeemed. You become irredeemable: the Karma Meter sets to its most evil setting and sticks there permanently. A rare case where this sort of karma-locking is totally justified - activating the Ray Sphere means that you are deliberately murdering thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people, solely to get a power-up.
• inFAMOUS: Second Son also gives players a karmic choice late in the game: spare Hank, the conduit who tried to sell you and your brother out so he could be reunited with his daughter, or kill him mere moments before he can reach her. And if that doesn't cross the line, the Evil ending will when Delsin's misdeeds get him expelled from the Akomish tribe, leading him to launch an Orbital Drop that will wipe them all out in retribution.
• In Infernax, you commit a few minor evil deeds but still finish with a decent ending, albeit one with a degree of Redemption Equals Death for Alcedor - he succumbs to his wounds and demons come to claim his soul, but a pair of angels intervene and carry him away to Heaven. However if you opt to allow Jarvis to be sacrificed by the cultists, the game locks you out of any good endings.
• Jak and Daxter
  • In Jak II, Erol crosses the line when he tries to run down Jak after losing both the big race and Keira. However, he winds up crashing into several barrels of Dark Eco and is blown up. He survives, but crosses the line even further by trying to destroy his world with the Dark Makers in the next game.
  • In the same game, Baron Praxis and Krew both cross the line at the same time by trying to crack open the last Precursor Egg, which will destroy the universe if so according to Young Samos and Vin. When Jak finally confronts Krew, the latter tries to bribe him off with a gun upgrade, but when Jak refuses to remain silent and quits being his hitman, Krew attacks him.
  • Despite his death in II, Krew crosses the line even further in Jak X: Combat Racing by spiking a champagne Jak and his friends were drinking to force them to work alongside his daughter Rayn in a combat racing tournament to win the antidote. Rayn isn't poisoned because she's in on the ploy, but asks her father's men to spare her new friends, avoiding the MEH.
  • Kor crosses this line when he kidnaps Jak's younger self, disables the shield walls, and murders Vin.
  • In Jak 3, Count Veger has Jak banished to the wasteland and has a Precursor Mecha attack him when he returns. But the real moment is when he openly mocks Jak for separating him from Damas, who was just revealed to be his father. And Damas was just killed, never knowing that Jak was his missing son. Jak doesn't take this very well, and even Daxter wants nothing more than sweet revenge.
  • GT Blitz, who is actually Mizo, crosses the line in Combat Racing when he steals the antidote for Krew's spiked champagne, opting to let the party die from being a Sore Loser and because he knew Rayn is now the top crime lord in Kras City.
• Kane & Lynch:
  • Which character doesn't cross the Moral Event Horizon? Well, Lynch has the excuse that he's a complete psychopath, but even his psychotic episodes cross it.
  • The part where Lynch has a psychotic episode and shoots Yoko, effectively ensuring that Kane's family will be killed, definitely counts. Made even worse when, instead of apologizing or something, he refuses to take responsibility and yells at Kane for negotiating deals with the enemy.
• Curtis Blackburn of Killer7 is a murderous sociopath, but hey, you're playing as a group of assassins. Then you see what he did to his ex-partner Pedro as punishment for getting in his way, and suddenly he becomes the worst person in the game.
  • Even before that, Curtis is known as a pedophile with a loli fetish and a penchant for selling organs on the black market. Although what happened to Pedro is one of the most gruesomely frightening moments in killer7, he's crossed the Moral Event Horizon well before.
• Killzone: Stahl is already quite nasty; he uses POWs as test subjects for his Petrusite experiments, and shoots an ISA prisoner just to show what it's like in Helghast. Then he destroys the Helghan fleet with his Petrusite weapons to show that he's in charge now, and plans to use it on Earth and possibly every other colonized world.
• The King of Fighters gives us several moments like this. Sorted by character, by the way.
  • Rugal Bernstein: Massacring Heidern's unit and his family, as well as putting out his left eye. And transforming the people he defeats into literal trophies. And beating Kyo's father within an inch of his life... to later get him Brainwashed and Crazy. The CD dramas and the Tatsuya Shinjyouji manga has him murdering his servants purely for committing goofs like bringing him the wrong things, and in the Shinjyouji manga, he also kidnaps Kyo's girlfriend Yuki to use her as the bait in a particularly cruel Deadly Game involving her, a time bomb, several phone calls, and the match between the Japan Team and the Women's Team in the streets of Osaka.
  • Goenitz: Aside from murdering Chizuru's twin sister Maki (made worse in KOF: KYO because in that continuity, the twins are little girls and he's an older teenager), he subjected a pre-teen Leona to More than Mind Control and made her kill her parents and her fellow villagers, solely because her father refused to re-join the Orochi clan. And in the KOF: G manga, he does that to her again. (Alongside killing thousands of people via merely showing up, and also beating Chizuru and Kensou within inches of their lives.)
  • Yashiro, Shermie, and Chris: Revealing themselves as members of the Orochi Clan and becoming the sub-bosses of '97. In the Sacred Team's pre-fight talk, add revealing that they plan to use the aforementioned Yuki as a Human Sacrifice, and mocking Kyo's anger and concern. It's even worse in the KOF: KYO game, because this is done in front of a restrained Yuki, whom they have been holding hostage for at least two days. (In the original game, they still had not gone after her.) If that wasn't enough, then successfully genociding all of humanity aside from themselves and Goenitz in their Awakened forms' ending in XV surely counts.
  • Clone Zero: Wiping South Town off the map with his Zero Cannon, killing dozens of innocents, all in a bid to become a world conqueror unburdened by NESTS. Needless to say, once word got to the real Zero of what his clone did, he was not pleased.
  • K9999: Backstabbing his own teammate Foxy, almost killing her, right in front of Kula (who thought of her as a mother), simply because NESTS considered her a traitor. As XV shows, despite having mellowed out over the years after adopting the identity of "Krohnen", neither Foxy nor Kula still fully trust him.
  • Igniz: After going A God Am I, he plays the NESTS members like pawns and discards them once they're not useful, which includes more or less sympathetic figures like Foxy, Diana, Kula, Candy, and especially Nameless and Isolde (Keep in mind that because of him, the first was severely wounded, the third was horribly traumatized, and the last three ended up bonafide dead). And once you defeat him, he throws what amounts to a cosmic tantrum and tries to pretty much destroy you alongside himself.
  • Ron, leader of the Hizoku: Razing his own village and murdering a sizable number of his clansmen to offer his services to NESTS for reasons unknown. He's labelled as a traitor by the clan, and nearly every survivor of that massacre who didn't jump ship with Ron is now hunting him down for answers and retribution. (Including clansman Lin, clanswoman Luan, son Duo Lon, and illegitimate daughter Xiao Lon.)
  • Saiki: Callously killing his most loyal and sympathetic servant, Mukai, right after he had offered to fight in his stead. And he follows it by taking over Fake Defector Ash's body to transform him into Evil Ash and keep fighting the heroes, much to Elisabeth and everyone else's horror.
• At the beginning of Kirby Mass Attack, Necrodeus appears out of nowhere and soars through the MEH by splitting Kirby into ten versions of himself and killing all but one of them. To truly demonstrate the shock, this happens at the beginning of the game. It says something when your Big Bad can nearly kill the main protagonist while barely lifting a finger.
  • Queen Sectonia is an interesting case in Kirby: Triple Deluxe. When Taranza summons her pleading for her to come to his rescue from defeat at Kirby's hands, what does she do? She just callously blasts him out of the tower, deciding that she has no use for "a fool who cannot follow orders", leading to Taranza's Et Tu, Brute? line towards her for what she did. The pause-screen description for the final phase of Soul of Sectonia at the end of The True Arena even lampshades that "a voice once called out to her, but it has since fallen silent".
  • Hyness from Kirby Star Allies crosses this by sucking the life energy out of the Three Mage-Sisters before using them as clubs to try and beat Kirby. He shoots over it even farther when he then forces the Mage-Sisters to sacrifice themselves into the Jamba Heart in order to power it up. Oh, and that's if he didn't cross for his implied abuse to the Mage-Sisters.
  • Fecto Forgo from Kirby and the Forgotten Land has their moments as well. Enslaving hundreds of Waddle Dees for labor and assimilating Leongar and several other members of the Beast Pack, not even caring for their genuine efforts to help them, just to get to Elfilin are two things, but after Kirby succeeds in rescuing Elfilin from them, how do they respond? By trying to crash Popstar into the new world and kill everybody in both worlds, all just to try to destroy Kirby. It really says something when Fecto is much more evil than any other Kirby villain before them without any redeeming qualities (yes, even including Necrodeus, Sectonia and Hyness above, the first being just a Generic Doomsday Villain and the second two being Tragic Villains). And all that's without even mentioning that the only reason for Fecto Forgo being in their current state is that they willingly attacked the new world and its native wildlife completely unprovoked.
• The ending of The Last of Us — due in no small part to the game's Grey-and-Gray Morality - has been divisive among those who have played it regarding which character involved crossed the Moral Event Horizon. The game hints that the fungus directly alters a host's brain, so when Joel and Ellie finally reach the Fireflies' headquarters, their leader, Marlene, reveals to Joel that the operation required to synthesize a hypothetical vaccine would inevitably kill Ellie. By this point, Joel has developed an essentially familial bond with her, and after she has ordered a troop to remove him from the premises, he kills said troop and proceeds to fight or sneak his way to the operation room. Upon arrival, he may or may not kill any or all of the surgeons present before carrying Ellie out, and killing Marlene when she attempts to dissuade him in the parking garage; effectively destroying current Firefly leadership and, given the fact that they were already on the defensive, possibly hampering any attempts of synthesizing a vaccine.
• Left 4 Dead has an interesting case of this. Bill is certainly no bad guy; however, in the third part of The Sacrifice comic, he refused to slow down the train for any survivors that were trying to get on, including a doctor that wanted to join them. Every survivor was horrendously eaten by the horde. Bill outright stated that anybody that's not in his group, alive or zombie, will not be saved. As expected, Zoey refuses to be even near Bill afterward. Subverted in that it is discovered that the survivors are asymptomatic carriers of the virus, which means the survivors would have turned into zombies if they boarded the train.
• In Trails of Cold Steel II as something lampshaded in-game, Duke Albarea definitely crossed the line when he ordered his soldiers and Northern Jaegers to raze Celdic, a town under his family's ruling, just to show his authority. This action indirectly killed one person who had helped Class VII in the previous game's Chapter 1 and left one boy in a coma for saving his friend. The event was so atrocious that the people who worked for him effectively left one by one. One person said you had to be mad to support him, one person (his son, no less) asked Class VII to apprehend his father for him since he couldn't considering his position in Noble Alliance, and one other commented that she would've gutted the Duke herself had she not been ordered for something else. What plunges him even further is that later, instead of realizing how horrible the order was, he ranted on how people betrayed him when it was his own action that made people leave.
• The Legend of Tian-ding: General Shimada crosses the line near the end when he had an unarmed civilian beaten to death before ordering his subordinate, Colonel Matsumoto, to massacre the entire population for showing resistance. It's enough to make Matsumoto pull a Defector from Decadence and betray Shimada.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Veran in The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Ages crosses the line in the early parts of the game when she sends her henchmen to kill the Mako Tree as a sapling.
  • Zant in Twilight Princess crossed this line in a similar manner when he executed Queen Rutela in front of the Zoras for standing up against the army of the Twilight Realm.
  • Yuga in ''A Link Between Worlds: crosses it when he reveals that he never actually cared about Lorule, that he himself was manipulating Hilda and that he plans to use the Triforce to become a god and remake Lorule in his image.
  • While Ganondorf in the original timelines has too many agency issues to really cross the line, the same cannot be said for his incarnation in Tears of the Kingdom. His cold-blooded murder of Queen Sonia and abduction of her secret stone is what rocketed him over the line into pure evil. His mocking Rauru over her death is just icing on the cake.
• LEGO Adaptation Game: Surprisingly, for games based off of an iconic children’s toy, there are certain characters who sink to unimaginable lows.
  • In LEGO City Undercover Forest Blackwell crossed it when he decided to launch his skyscraper-sized rocket, which would have certainly killed everyone in LEGO City had Chase not put up a forcefield around the exhaust fumes in time.
  • In LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, Loki crossed it in the penultimate mission by revealing that he planned to mind-control Galactus into eating both the Earth and Asgard simply to get revenge for his previous defeats. This disgusts the other villains (on grounds of pragmatism to a degree, admittedly) into joining the heroes to help fight against him.
• Live A Live: Most of the villains, at least the sentient ones, crossed it in some way or another within their arcs:
  • The Kuu Tribe chief ordering Zaki and his underlings to capture Beru in order to sacrifice her to their dinosaur god Odo.
  • Ou Di Wan Lee ordering his henchmen to kill two of the students while distracting the Shifu with the Tiger King.
  • Odie O'Bright killing the other six opponents and either openly mocking them as weaklings or joyfully describing how he did it depending on the script.
  • Odeo's followers had already crossed it when they ordered the Crusaders to burn Bright Sparks down in retaliation against Akira and Matsu for messing with their laboratory They cross it one more time when they had already sacrificed 2,000 humans to revive Odeo.
  • OD-10 crosses it when it hijacks a Cube prototype to kill Rachel offscreen and attempt for Darthe and Kato's life, while claiming that the ship is under its control and "resistance is futile".
  • Streibough crossed it when he tricked Oersted into killing the King just to get Alethea for himself.
  • Oersted himself crossed it off-screen. While annihilating all lives in Lucrece can be excused with him going Roaring Rampage of Revenge, he did not spare that one boy that turned out to still believe in him (unlike everyone else) despite all that happened. That's the moment where there's no turning back for Oersted as Odio.

M - P

• Schezo Wegey ironically inverts this. His first big role as the Big Bad has him kidnap Arle, with intent of stealing her power which would likely result in her death. Not even getting decapitated stops him from trying to kill her one last time. Every appearance Schezo has made since then portrays him as a lot more honorable, to the point where his current incarnation doesn't even resemble the monster he was back then. That said, we learn he became the way he is because he's under the influence of Runelord, who corrupted Schezo as a teenager. Runelord is undead after Ragnus killed him, but not before Runelord killed Ragnus' girlfriend and cursed him. That, along with everything Schezo did under his control, is essentially one big leap over the MEH for Runelord.
• Seedle's backstory revealed in the last episode of Makai Kingdom even has several Overlords pissed with him. Put quick and dirty, when the two were human he (an allegedly noble samurai) attempted to rape Salome (who fought back and killed him), and she was burned at the stake for slaying a hero; he thinks it's not enough.
• The Mass Effect series tends strongly towards ambiguity, but there are still some cases where a line to ultimate unredeemable evil is crossed.
  • Even though he can be seen as not responsible for his actions in Mass Effect, one optional dialog reveals that Saren crossed the line a long time before any of that. While on a mission with Anderson, he destroyed a refinery, killing hundreds of civilians, then attempted to frame Anderson for the operation's failure because he didn't want the council to induct a human into the Spectres. These actions are confirmed and detailed in the first Mass Effect novel.
  • The Collectors in Mass Effect 2 are pretty evil, but most of the time, they simply emotionlessly capture paralyzed humans and bring them to their ships. But at their home base, they melt them alive with nanites to harvest their organic components as a building material for a new Reaper. The Collectors aren't really the ones responsible, however. Harbinger, the Reaper controlling them, was.
  • Shepard and crew discover that Jacob's dad Ronald Taylor crossed it when after being stranded, he forced all but his officers to eat the planet's flora, which was toxic and caused neural decay. He then exiled the male members of the crew while turning the female members into Sex Slaves for him and his officers. That's bad enough, but then there's him knowing about the distress signal the entire time, but never telling anyone or activating it until he finally wanted to leave due to him developing a hell of a power trip. It's little wonder that Jacob wants nothing to do with Ronald toward the end of his loyalty mission.
  • In Overlord, Dr. Gavin Archer forced his own autistic brother David to take part in a traumatic experiment. The Paragon interrupt once Shepard finds out just what the hell Archer is doing is a Pistol Whip to his face. He is shown in Mass Effect 3 to have defected from Cerberus, and also made sure to destroy what was left of Project Overlord in the process. He also out and out told the Illusive Man that, "if he wanted the devil, all he had to do was look in the mirror". However, it's still noted that he crossed a line that can never be completely undone, and a Commander Shepard who played through the DLC remains distrustful of and hostile towards him.
  • Cerberus has been shown to be completely ruthless in their research projects throughout all the games, which often resulted in heavy casualties from escaped experiments, and they were never above murdering anyone who started to know too much about their activities. But in Mass Effect 3, they drop all pretense and secrecy and straight out murder any witnesses. That's not where they cross the Moral Event Horizon, though. The final line is on Sanctuary, where they set up a refugee camp to get new supplies of humans to be turned into mind-controlled cyborg soldiers. Everyone who doesn't fit the specifications gets turned into Husks to become live targets for new anti-reaper weapons.
  • Another example from the third game: Quarian Admiral Han'Gerrel vas Neema is willing to destroy the geth dreadnought despite the fact that Shepard and Tali / Xen are still aboard, and later can potentially doom his race, all because of how much he wants to destroy the geth.
  • Even a pure Renegade Shepard seems to have definitely crossed this line by Mass Effect 3. Fans of the series will argue over how evil his/her questionable deeds over the first two games were (the usual list includes killing Wrex, the Rachni Queen, Gianna Parasini, Aresh, and Samara, and leaving civilians to vaporize/burn to death in order to get Balak/Vido Santiago). However, all of those things could be seen as at least somewhat justified, both by in-universe characters and by players. What really seems completely monstrous and unjustifiable in the third game is if Shepard murders Mordin/Padok Wiks to sabotage the cure for the genophage if Wrex is the clan leader (or, to a lesser extent, if Wreav is the clan leader and Eve survives). To make matters worse, if Wrex is the clan leader, he will confront Shepard about it later. Shepard will attempt to lie to his face and either kill him or have C-Sec gun him down. After all of that, even Shepard seems to think he/she crossed the line. Special mention should also be given to not only allowing Samara to commit suicide to avoid having to kill her one remaining daughter in her mission in 3, but then killing said daughter yourself. Not only is it evil, it's completely unnecessary.
• This happens in Mega Man Zero 3, when Copy-X and Weil destroy a human residential area to capture the Dark Elf. Though Weil was Obviously Evil upon his introduction, Copy-X's previous actions^note Heavy discrimination against and "retiring" innocent reploids to conserve energy so human society is mostly unaffected by the recent energy crisis were a bit more morally ambiguous up until now. At this point, Harpuia can't stand it anymore and defects from Neo Arcadia. A bit later, when Copy X and Weil contact the resistance to cooperate, Ciel cites this event as why they can't be trusted.
• Metal Gear:
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Colonel Volgin crosses this right after he's introduced. The Boss gave him two Davy Crockett portable nuclear warheads as a "gift" when she defected, and he decides to take one on a test drive, blowing up the research facility (where thousands of his own countrymen were still stationed) while Ocelot clings to his arm, begging him not to. When one of the greatest Magnificent Jerk-faced Jerks in history thinks you've gone so far over the line that he's begging you to stop, you know you've crossed the line big time.
  • Colonel Volgin is small time compared to the one behind, or at least is the indirect cause of, a lot of the events in the series, Major Zero. Although his status as a villain is only revealed in the chronologically final main game, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, when it is, the implications of so much of what this man has done become apparent. Not only did he create a shadow organization meant to control every facet of human life, but he created a system meant to completely subjugate and ultimately enslave humanity in a cyclical hell of controlled military conflict for generations to come, simply because he felt sour about bitter differences between himself and Big Boss. And on top of that, he attempted to destroy and manipulate his former friend with a variety of despicable tactics, such as threatening and manipulating a Costa Rican-American girl to become a crazed agent and saboteur in order to destroy Big Boss' reputation. It was also enough to cause Kazuhira Miller, who briefly worked with Zero as a means to expand MSF, to have quit working with him out of disgust for nearly ruining MSF (though, the bit about Miller is merely implied). It's uncertain where exactly Zero crossed that moral event horizon, but he certainly did. So did most of Big Boss' former "friends", save Ocelot and EVA.
  • In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, it's revealed that Hot Coldman set up what happened in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. In other words, he's the reason The Boss got killed because he feared her growing influence. He's also indirectly responsible for Major Zero's fall as well. Worse is that he shows absolutely no remorse for what he did and a little glee. If that's not enough, he also instigates a nuclear apocalypse again, and it is implied that he was the one responsible for the butchered AIs in 4 (Coldman makes some statements that parallel the AIs forsaking The Boss's will when developing the War Economy).
  • Vamp in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty crosses it when he murders Otacon's sister, Emma.
  • In the original Metal Gear Solid, Liquid Snake is an evil son-of-a-bitch from the beginning, but the kid gloves are off when it's revealed that he was impersonating Master Miller after having him killed.
  • Solidus Snake crossed it in Raiden's backstory, where he is revealed to be Raiden's parents' murderer, and just to rub salt in the wound, turned Raiden into a brutal Child Soldier that later results in him being a psychological wreck.
  • And the latest addition is Skull Face in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, a sadistic freak who crossed the MEH with flying colors by serving as a chief torturer on Camp Omega, a Hellhole Prison camp; amongst his actions are implicitly scorching a man to death, brutally beating, whipping, crippling, and raping Chico and Paz, destroying Mother Base through a sneak attack that killed almost everyone, and sending Big Boss into a coma only to wake up nine years later to see his life threatened a second time by this lunatic's XOF Unit.
  • In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Huey is portrayed as the most pathetic thing in the entire game and is convicted of murdering hundreds via experimental technology. At the very least, there is concrete evidence that he murdered his wife because she tried to save their son from being used as his test subject.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Most anything Desperado and World Marshall are allowed to do is this, but what really sets them up is kidnapping kids off the street, removing their brains, and putting them through horrific VR training to turn them into cyborg supersoldiers. Sundowner has his Establishing Character Moment with his brutal murder of N'mani and gloating about it.
• In Metroid Dread, a warrior tribe of Chozo known as the Mawkin is revealed to have cross it long ago when they slaughtered their fellow Chozo tribe, the Thoha, after they sealed the Metroids away on SR388 as depicted in Metroid: Samus Returns. Their leader, Raven Beak, did it for a despicable reason: He wanted to use the Metroids to conquer the galaxy and had the Thoha killed when he learned of their plan to destroy the creatures, sparing only one Thoha member, Quiet Robe, for their knowledge of the Metroids. It says something when Samus Aran doesn't personally know Raven Beak, and yet expresses an unprecedented amount of rage and hatred towards him that rivals the likes of her infamous Arch-Enemy Ridley.
• Monster Loves You! mostly averts this in-universe, with one exception. You can do heinous things — up to and including child murder — but no single action will place you beyond all redemption. It's the sum total of your words and deeds that will ultimately save or doom you and/or all monsterdom. The lone exception is, upon meeting the humans at the very end of the game, you decide to slash a Human's throat instead of stepping forward in peace. This action, regardless of your stats or how much you've caused Humans and Monsters to like each other, triggers the Endless War ending.
• In Mortal Kombat, Shao Kahn's always been a nasty character, but he crosses it in 9 when he snaps Kung Lao's neck shortly after the latter won a tournament
  • Quan Chi also crosses it by disguising himself as Sub-Zero/Bi-Han and exterminating the entire Shirai Ryu, leading to Scorpion's resurrection as a revenge-driven revenant, and his manipulation of Scorpion into murdering Sub-Zero/Bi-Han despite his pleas that he did not do so.
• Mushihime Sama Futari brings us Queen Larsa, who goes psycho-insane after learning that her older son Aki has been killed, and sends her army out to kill Reco, who accidentally murdered him in the previous game. Sounds like typical Mama Bear tyrant fare. Then there's her younger son, Palm, who, while understandably upset by his brother's death, believes Reco to be a good person and that Aki's death wasn't her fault. How does Larsa react to this? She disowns him and leaves him to die. And tells him he can be replaced. If you make it to her as Palm, she tries to kill him — although she is a shmup final boss, that she would try to kill her own son — at full strength, no less — says something about how little she cares for anyone other than Aki.
• In Myst IV: Revelation, Sirrus kidnaps Yeesha for Grand Theft Me purposes and boasts to her of his plan.
  • Myst V: Nekisahloth — that's his shoulder skin Esher used to link — is a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds until the murder of Willow Engberg.
  • In the novel Book of D'ni, Ymur is another Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds until he tries to become the new Master, in the same barbaric vein as the Terahnee enslaved ahrotantee.
  • Saavedro — and you — can cross the Moral Event Horizon in various endings of Myst III: Exile. If you lower the outer shield when Saavedro says to, he says "time to keep my end of the bargain" — and throws the fucking Releeshahn Book away before setting off. Later, if you get the Book from him, you have the option of leaving him trapped with no way out. Atrus calls you out if you do this.
• An evil Player Character in Neverwinter Nights 2 usually comes across as a Card-Carrying Villain or a brutish thug, and doesn't really get an opportunity to do anything truly evil… until the end-game. Then it becomes a question of not "did they cross the line", but "when did they cross the line". It could be when you quite cheerfully turn on all your former comrades, brutally kill them, and then bring them back to life as twisted undead so they can serve you and the King of Shadows forever. It could be when you lead legions of demons and the undead against Neverwinter and turn half the Sword Coast into a Crapsack World. Or it could be when you capture your foster father after he sets out to avenge you, torture him to death, then bring him back to life so you can do it all over again for your personal amusement. And the worst part is that everyone remembers you as a hero, because they didn't recognize you when you conquered them and thought you'd been slain by the "new general" (you) because s/he had your sword and cape.
  • Ammon Jerro crosses the line when he violently murders his granddaughter Shandra, because she tried to stop him from killing you. It's especially notable in that your other two Token Evil Teammates, a sociopath and a Social Darwinist respectively, will be outright disgusted by the act if they're present. Hell, Ammon himself will admit what he did is irredeemable if you confront him about it. If he does express his regret, Shandra sends him a token of forgiveness from the afterlife.
  • Myrkul, former god of the dead, in the expansion pack: if he didn't cross the line when he created a soul-eating wall to send "the Faithless"^note those who don't worship any gods to, he crossed it when he used it to create a soul-eating Eldritch Abomination out of Akachi, his own High Priest, because Akachi tried to save his lover from the Wall.
  • You can cross the line in the same expansion (which Retcons the evil ending of the original campaign) by eating as many souls as you can to turn yourself into a god-killing Humanoid Abomination, including the souls of your companions, and then going on such a massive killing spree that the gods themselves decide to step in and stop you.
• Octopath Traveler:
  • If Helgenish didn't already cross it with his enslavement of women to work in his tavern, he definitively crosses it when he fatally stabs Yusufa after having her tortured and then heartlessly makes fun of her last words to Primrose.
  • The Crow Men in general are on the wrong side of the line to begin with, but Albus, the least rotten of the trio, firmly crossed it in his degeneration of the security of Noblecourt after the downfall of Geoffrey Azelhart, using his expertise and authority in the city guard to ruthlessly snuff out any opponents to his regime and threatening the rest into line, including his former second-in-command Revello Forsythe. All for money.
  • Vanessa Hysel in chapter 2 of Alfyn’s story is later revealed to have crossed it with her very first onscreen action, feeding Flynn medicine that she knew would eventually kill her without the glow worm moss cure she had no intention of providing for any price her mother was capable of paying.
  • Miguel Twinspears crosses it in Alfyn's Chapter 3 by repaying his kindness by kidnapping an innocent child and nearly murdering him, all while cruelly mocking Alfyn's willingness to help others.
  • Gideon, the antagonist of Cyrus' Chapter 2, crossed it by kidnapping ten people to use in his blood crystal research, which resulted in several of his captives dying.
  • Lucia, the main antagonist of Cyrus' route, crossed it when she deliberately gave her own ally Yvon an imperfect blood-crystal so that she could take the knowledge he acquired from the tome From the Far Reaches of Hell for herself, knowing that he would eventually die from his own body mutating. The kicker? Not only had Lucia planned Yvon's downfall all along, but her ultimate goal is to use a perfect blood-crystal on herself, become immortal, and learn all the knowledge in the world to keep to herself so that she can feel superior to everybody else.
    • Yvon himself seemingly crossed it when he orchestrated the plot to kill Cyrus for finding out too much about From the Far Reaches of Hell, by having Lucia lure him into a trap. However, lore in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon reveals that he actually crossed it years before the plot even began, when he murdered the then-headmaster of the Royal Academy of Atlasdam to usurp the position and gain access to From the Far Reaches of Hell, believing himself to be more deserving of the position and its privileges.
  • Mattias, the main antagonist of Ophilia's route, appeared to have crossed it when he tricked Lianna into stealing the ember to initiate a dark ritual in the vain hope of bringing her father Archbishop Josef Back from the Dead, as he knows the ritual will claim the lives of several of his followers in exchange for power from a God of Evil. However, lore in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon reveals that he had already crossed it before that by discreetly poisoning Josef for that very purpose.
  • Darius, the main antagonist of Therion's route, crossed it in backstory, by betraying him to the Ciannos and kicking him off a cliff, leaving him for dead. The kicker? His motivation for doing so is money.
  • Werner, the main antagonist of Olberic’s route, has several candidates for the moment he crosses it. Take your pick:
    • Burning Erhardt’s home-village Grynd to the ground as part of his Engineered Heroics gambit to gain approval within Hornburg by sending bandits to destroy villages on the borders before sending mercenaries to beat back his own men, before Hornburg’s knights could arrive.
    • Taking advantage of Erhardt’s bitter hatred for King Alfred’s neglect to save the people of his village to convince the soon-to-be knight to help him commit regicide and bring the entire kingdom of Hornburg to ruin. All to gain the power beyond the Gate of Finis.
    • If overthrowing the rightful ruler of Riverford using lies and deceit to install himself as the new lord doesn’t count, then leading a tyrannical regime that burns citizens at the stake for the most trivial of reasons, until hardly anyone in Riverford dared question his rule, definitely does.
  • Attempting to trick Graham to open the Gate of Finis and release Galdera? Turning him into Redeye, a mindless beast, for trying to go back on you? Masterminding every other Moral Event Horizon-crossing in the game? Successfully tricking Graham's son Kit into opening the Gate of Finis? For the true mastermind, Lyblac, the question isn't when she crossed the Moral Event Horizon, but rather how many times does she plan on doing so.
• Octopath Traveler II:
  • As if murdering Osvald's wife and daughter and framing him for it wasn't enough, Harvey manages to go the extra mile at the climax of Osvald's story where it's revealed he actually faked their deaths...so he could brainwash Elena into thinking Harvey was her father in order to make her more compliant as a Human Sacrifice, but also used Osvald's wife, Rita, to create a mindless monster which he then sics on Osvald, clearly reveling in Osvald's pain as he is forced to put it down while believing it’s Rita herself.
  • Arcanette crossed it when she took advantage of Tanzy's genuine love for her and used it to manipulate and string her along before coldly murdering her as a sacrifice to douse the Sacred Flames and revive Vide.
  • Trousseau crossed it when he callously murdered almost everyone in his village, including his fellow apothecaries, before attempting to do the same to Timberain.
  • Claude having a huge number of children over the course of his immortality isn't the problem: the MEH comes in when he reveals that the Blacksnakes are all his children, and that he violently pitted them against each other to try and create the perfect heir. In other words, all the cruelty, backstabbing, and pain that Throné and the others in her story experience was orchestrated by him. If that's not enough to make him cross it, then driving Trousseau mad and thus being directly responsible for all the deaths the latter caused certainly is.
  • Kaldena and Cubaryi crossed it by killing Crick in cold blood for digging too deeply into the investigation, with Cubaryi going further over the line by sadistically taunting Temenos about it when he confronts her.
  • Mugen crossed it by murdering most of Ku’s citizens just because he knew he would be unpopular with them. He then kills his father for deciding that Hikari should ascend the throne instead of him.
  • Petrichor, the Dark Hunter crossed it by smashing Glacis' egg and killing her unborn baby out of spite at failing to capture her. Killing Cateracta and mutating Roi and Akalā/Mahina into the Dark Entity and Darkling of the Sorrowful Moon, respectively, were certainly heinous acts, but she committed them on Arcanette's orders for the sake of accentuating the Night of the Scarlet Moon. By contrast, killing Glacis' baby within her egg was a pointless act of cruelty that benefitted no-one.
• Ninetails from Ōkami crosses it by horribly murdering the innocent, beloved priestess Rao and stuffing her body down a well in order to deceive the populace, Ammy included. And then, once it had accomplished its goals, it drove Queen Himiko to her own death.
• Overwatch:
  • Talon crossed it when they abducted the completely innocent Amélie Lacroix, subjected her to intense brainwashing, neural reconditioning, and mental reprogramming to become Widowmaker, all for the sake of murdering her husband. Then she becomes a remorseless assassin, killing innocent people in the name of causing as much chaos as possible.
  • Widowmaker herself isn't completely free from this, despite everything that happened to her. She takes delight in killing, having fully embraced her sadistic side, and ultimately crossed this when she assassinated Tekhartha Mondatta, potentially creating more chaos in the world between the already-damaged relationships between humans and Omnics.
  • Reaper, then known as Gabriel Reyes, committed a wide variety of atrocities while running Blackwatch, which Cole "Jesse McCree" Cassidy felt were even worse than what a notorious group like the Deadlock Gang does. He ultimately crossed it by leaking those same atrocities to turn public opinion against Overwatch, and then attempting to kill the loyal and righteous members of the team.
    • Alternatively, he crossed it when he straight-up murdered the Talon executive Antonio after the latter boasts about being able to get out of jail should he be arrested, and for hurting Gabe's ego. While he has done more detestable actions after that, this is when he started Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and started Overwatch's fall from grace.
  • Vishkar Corporation when they blew up a Brazilian favela, just to get the residents to accept their "improvements".
• Planescape: Torment. The game's plot revolves around the Nameless One trying to figure out exactly how you redeem yourself for committing one of these. Exactly what he did is never revealed, but it was sufficiently morally damning that a lifetime of nothing but saintly deeds could not make up for it, and in the end, he has no choice but to suffer penance for it in the Blood War. Except that in the end, he does have a choice — he can end his existence entirely, or just continue eternal life in ignorance, instead of dying. The best ending of the game is the Nameless One choosing to pay his penance... because, in a way, choice can change the nature of a man.
• In Portal 2, Cave Johnson's posthumous Moral Event Horizon — uploading his secretary Caroline's mind into GLaDOS against her will — was Dummied Out because the lines seemed unnecessary.
• [PROTOTYPE] has the real Alex Mercer cross this the moment he unleashed the Blacklight virus on Manhattan just because he is cornered at Penn Station by Blackwatch. The virus itself, born from his death when it animated his corpse, is horror-struck by the sheer vindictiveness he displayed.
• Psychonauts: As if Doctor Loboto wasn't bad enough, he crosses the Horizon by forcing Sheegor to steal more psychic brains for him by threatening to cook her pet turtle, Mr. Pokeylope (who's extremely intelligent and has a brain the size of an average human), if she doesn't. The exact moment: "Well, maybe I'll just make a cup for myself."

Q - T

• In Red Dead Redemption, Edgar Ross, when he's first seen in the opening cutscene, merely seems to be a bureaucrat making John hunt down his former gang members. When you finally get a hold of Escuella in Mexico, he definitely seems to be an awful individual, especially since he is the one imprisoning John's family. When dealing with him personally in Blackwater, he continues to build his jerkass points for every second he's onscreen, constantly insulting and mocking John, and at one point shoving a gun into John's stomach just to remind him that he can do whatever he wants, and John can't do a thing about it. However, once John takes care of all of the former outlaws he ran with, Ross lets him go, and John is finally allowed to return back to his family... just so Ross can hunt them down while they're making breakfast, sending waves of innocent Mounties to their deaths as the Marstons defend their ranch and take casualties of loved ones, all because Ross wanted to claim the glory of killing the last official, non-mayoral member of Dutch's gang. Before this point, he was simply a thoroughly unlikable man who hated John. After this, he crossed the line. The prequel reveals he learned how to be an unrepentant glory-hound from his mentor.
• Return to Krondor starts off with Bear and his pirates killing off a ship full of priests to steal treasure and one special object. If this does not qualify as a Moral Event Horizon, then the next few parts will. Bear attacks a bar and kills a young barmaid (it may have been worse than that), leaving the bar owner without a daughter. He attacks a jail just so he can personally kill a small-time pirate who decided he needed to get out of the business. He cut down half the Krondorian guard squad. The guard captain is Bear's cousin. The guard captain wants to keep that fact a secret and he really wants to take Bear down. He sets an orphanage on fire when he is unable to escape the city through the gates. He escapes through the sewer, tearing through the Mockers (the Guild of Thieves) who got in the way. Bear accomplished all this in the first couple of levels. It seems that he not only crossed the Moral Event Horizon before the events of the game, but he sprinted through it and never looked back.
• Riddle School: Big Bad Viz crosses this when he decides to destroy planets simply for personal pleasure and then dresses it up as “destroying evil”.
• Saints Row has several of these crisscrossing one another, on both your side and the side of the enemy gangs and police. Mr. Sharp killing Lin by slow drowning and a gut shot. Tanya betraying King and Warren to seize power for herself. Julius blowing you up. Shogo ordering the interrogation and death of Aishia, and then crashing her funeral to get an advantage over killing her husband. Johnny Gat burying Shogo alive for it. Jessica having Carlos strapped to the back bumper of a truck and dragged through the street face-first. Mr. Sunshine getting everyone's attention by macheteing some poor bastard in the back as he listened to music. Dexter selling out to Ultor and trying to kill you numerous times. STAG staging a terrorist incident, and then trying to blow up Steelport. Cyrus defecting to terrorists and staging a nuclear attack on Washington. Killbane snapping Kiki's neck right in front of her twin sister, just for calling him by his first name. But the Boss, being the player character, gets the most. The Boss kills Jessica by making her boyfriend mistakenly drive a monster truck over a car she is trapped in, crippled the hand of a musician and tattoo artist whose only guilt was by association, manipulated an otherwise innocent Donny over the course of two games, shoots Julius after fighting alongside him, gets involved in human trafficking, has the option of weaponizing a zombie virus, and can in one game ending take over a city and make it secede from the United States, which will no doubt bring retribution down on everyone they know and the innocent civilians living there. These are not nice people we are dealing with, here.
  • And then Zinyak, the otherwise Wicked Cultured ruler of an entire nation, tops that by blowing up Earth. It's implied that he and his predecessors have done this on a frequent basis.
• SAS Zombie Assault 4: In the mission Ice Station, the HVM soldiers (including the captain) crosses it when they destroy the ambulance being loaded with patients because they "have their orders". This implies that HVM was responsible for the Zombie Apocalypse.
• Saya no Uta’s Fuminori Sakisaka, if he decides he has no qualms with eating human meat. Just listen to him when Kouji comments to him on his cell phone about becoming "quite the meat eater":
  Fuminori: "Actually, I've only killed one so far. I've taken apart three or four, though. I've gotten pretty good at cutting the tendons and draining the blood and such."
  • Fuminori's line-cross is even worse: The player chooses whether he goes through with it, in one of TWO moments in the entire story.
• Another option for the player to cross the horizon: using a Planet Buster in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Using one will put you beyond redemption in the eyes of the rest of humanity (unless you repealed the UN Charter), and trigger a round of Gaia's Vengeance from an already contentious ecosystem. Made even more noticeable because not only will the Planetbuster obliterate its target, it will probably level the entire continent it hits, leaving nothing but a giant crater, as a personal reminder to everyone, and yourself, what a bastard you are.
  • This is part of a broader game mechanic called "atrocities", acts that are often of huge benefit but so morally bankrupt that every other faction will call you out, because Everyone Has Standards. For example, using nerve stapling on your own population to quiet discontent.
• In Silent Hill 3, Claudia crosses this when she has Harry killed. She certainly seems to think so, as she straight-up tells Heather that she doesn't expect to have a place in the paradise she's trying to create.
  "For the pain that I've caused you, I deserve no mercy. Even if it was to save mankind, it was too deep a sin."
• Right in the first level of Singularity, you read some notes and hear recordings that suggest that the Big Bad had done some highly unethical things in the '50s. But all of that is off-screen and only (strongly) implied. When you meet him at the end of the level, your partner demands to be treated according to the Geneva Convention and to see someone from the United States embassy. The Big Bad coldly shoots him in the face.
• In Skies of Arcadia, Lord Galcian gains the ability to destroy any or all of the lands underneath the Six Moons. To display his newfound power, he summons the Rains of Destruction from the Yellow Moon. What is underneath the Yellow Moon? Valua, the most technologically advanced land in Arcadia, and it just so happens to be Galcian's homeland as well! Galcian figured that if the most powerful country in the world could be reduced to ashes in no time, the rest would fall to him. What is amazing about this is that the Valuan army, the army of the country that he just wiped off the map, continue to stick with him, as Galcian is that much of a Magnificent Bastard.
• Sly Cooper:
  • Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus:
    • Clockwerk definitely crossed it when he had the Fiendish Five kill Sly's parents, but it turns out that his whole reason for it? He hates the Cooper line and wants to surpass their reputation.
    • While we only learn of the villain's main evil deeds in their stage's introductory stages, we actually see the Panda King destroy a mountain village because they wouldn't pay his protection racket... then, when you enter his compound, you hear an announcement from the Panda King telling his workers to murder any survivors in case they come to the compound looking for vengeance. This, and his part in killing Sly's parents, is part of the reason why Sly refuses to recruit him in the third game or forgive him.
  • Neyla in Sly 2: Band of Thieves has a few potential crossings. The first is when she betrays the Cooper Gang (except Bentley) to The Contessa, and frames Carmelita as being in league with them, causing the game's Cerebus Syndrome.
    • But the most likely moment is after Clockwerk is reassembled. Her actual boss, Arpeggio, intends to fuse himself with Clockwerk to become immortal (and to fly), but Neyla trips him over and enters the frame herself, becoming Clock-La. She then crushes Arpeggio with her beak. As Clock-La, she intends to use this trope a lot to remain hated and immortal, but the Cooper Gang stops her. Before she dies, Clock-La uses the last of her strength to crush Bentley the same way she crushed Arpeggio, crippling him for life.
  • Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves:
    • Octavio has a few potential crossings. For Sly, it's kidnapping Bentley and threatening to use his brains to fertilize his tomatoes, which the turtle is allergic to. For Bentley, it's using tar to kill innocent fish. For Murray, it's kicking Bentley out of his wheelchair and taunting him, which was enough for Murray to abandon his training and beat the gut out of Octavio.
    • General Tsao crosses this line when he captures the Panda King's daughter and forces her to marry him, despite her pleading to be released. His views on women really help him cross it. Even Sly admits that, of all the criminals he faced, Tsao was the worst.
    • Captain LeFwee secretly following the Cooper Gang as they find the diving gear belonging to Dimitri's grandfather, then revealing himself and taking Penelope hostage. If that's not enough, it's when he tries to kill Bentley, which results in Penelope kicking his ass and sending him to Davy Jones' Locker via hungry sharks.
  • Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time: Le Paradox either crosses it when he abandons Ms. Decible, the woman he supposedly loved, or when he repays Sly's kind act of saving his life by leaving him stranded on his blimp to die.
    • The same game also pulls this trope on Penelope, who sells the Cooper Gang out to Le Paradox for money. It's later revealed that Penelope is an immoral sociopath, and had been plotting to use Bentley's skills to make a fortune in the billions through weapon designs and Take Over the World by warfare, and has no problems with letting millions of people die to satisfy her greed and lust for power. When Bentley calls Penelope out on this, she refuses to listen to his pleas to stop, and attacks him with murderous intent, proving to Bentley that Penelope never loved him.
• Soul Nomad & the World Eaters is a case where the protagonist has definitely crossed the horizon over the course of the Demon Path. By the end of the first battle, you've killed everyone in your village and before the death of a married couple, made it clear you wouldn't hesitate to kill their child too.
• In Spec Ops: The Line, Capt. Martin Walker, the player character, ultimately has to come to grips with the fact that he himself has crossed the moral event horizon. In fact, "The Line" referred to in the game's title is metaphorical, as Walker's actions result in the deaths of his squad members and many others. Had he just stopped at any point, all parties involved would have been better off. Using white phosphorous on enemy troops is not a war crime, but it is horrible, as was shown to the player. Earlier in the game, you narrowly avoid being hit with such an attack and fight on in the consequence. The MEH was after using the white phosphorous when Walker doesn't give a damn that he neglected to ensure that he was targeting combatants and fried 47 civilians and never once took responsibility for the decision. Walker blames Conrad for that scene and vows vengeance on the colonel for the people Walker's orders killed.
• In Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, choosing the evil decisions lead to some pretty mean acts against the characters around you. But one thing that can particularly make the Web-Head cross the line is the dark option against Symbiote Wolverine: Spider-Man rips the Symbiote in half. With Wolverine attached to it. To repeat: Spider-Man can cross this by RIPPING WOLVERINE IN HALF.
  • The entire storyline is one long-running line-crosser for the Venom symbiote itself — having Eddie completely succumb to its will (and stating that he is just a "small part of what [it is]") while planning to cause a gigantic global-scale symbiote invasion, which would ultimately lead to Eddie denying its influence the only way he could — uniting in death.
• Splatoon 2: In the Octo Expansion, Commander Tartar, under the alias of Telephone, crosses the line when, after Agent 8 collects the four "thangs", it puts them together into the form of a blender and tries to blend Agent 8 (and Cap'n Cuttlefish) into the ooze seen throughout the expansion. Had it not been for Agent 3, the two would've been killed. Tartar later tries to use that same ooze to "destroy Inkopolis and everyone in it" in order to create a new, perfect race to pass down humanity's knowledge to. That's not even getting to how it may have already crossed the line for blending up to 10,006 other test subjects beforehand, given that Iso Padre is a confirmed test subject and how it refers to Agent 8 as "applicant/number 10,008".
• Spyro the Dragon:
  • The Sorceress in Spyro: Year of the Dragon crossed the Moral Event Horizon when she reveals to Bianca that she doesn't want to keep the baby dragons in the Forgotten Realms to keep the magic alive, she wants to kill them all and take their wings for a spell to make her immortal.
  The Sorceress: "I don't have to kill them. It just stops them from wriggling too much.''
  • The Legend of Spyro:
    • If waging war on countless innocents didn't make Malefor an irredeemable bastard, unleashing The Destroyer to annihilate the planet definitely did.
    • Gaul crossed it by laying siege to the dragon temple and committing mass infanticide by destroying all of the unhatched eggs there.
• In Starcraft, there are a few. Arcturus Mengsk deploys a psi-emitter on the Confederate capital world of Tarsonis, consigning every life form on the planet (including over two billion humans) to death by the Zerg, leaving his right-hand woman Sarah Kerrigan to die in the process. Prior to Tarsonis, Mengsk had only deployed psi-emitters against Confederate troops. Letting the Horde of Alien Locusts eat your enemies? That's a Kick the Dog for sure, but could be justifiable. Calling said Alien Locusts to a planet with not only military forces, but with billions of innocents on it, and then sitting back and watching the slaughter? That's this trope. Kerrigan (very loyal to Arcturus) even calls him on it. Unfortunately, that causes him to decide that Kerrigan has outlived her usefulness, and leave her to the Zerg as well.
  • In Starcraft II Wings Of Liberty, guess what Raynor has now told EVERYONE? This is out, and Mengsk is now approaching 0% approval rating.
  • In Starcraft II Heart Of The Swarm, he was definitely beyond redemption when he ordered his fleet to fire on the Hyperion even knowing his own son was aboard!
  • It's hard to say if Kerrigan crossed it because it's unknown how much control she has over her own actions after being turned into a Zerg, but Infested Kerrigan's moment of crossing is when she betrays her allies and kills Fenix, just so she doesn't have to deal with him in the future (she also kills Duke, but he was an Asshole Victim).
    • It was for Raynor. Indeed, one of the main plots of Wings of Liberty is Raynor and Valerian finding a way to pull her back.
  • Samir Duran tricks DuGalle into thinking Alexei Stukov was a traitor, and leads DuGalle into having Stukov killed.
  • Stukov and DuGalle's meeting at the beginning of Brood War, over a hapless terran base overrun by Zerg, brought there by the UED themselves! It's debatable whether it was the crossing of the UED into the event horizon since they hadn't done anything else yet, but it certainly showed you they weren't fucking around. The Power of Rock didn't save THOSE marines...
    • Even DuGalle knows they're crossing a line here:
  Stukov: I know all about the Zerg, Gerard. We've all seen the tapes a hundred...
  DuGalle: You've seen nothing! Studying a dissected Zerg in a lab is one thing, unleashing them on men is another! You must go into this with both eyes open. Once started, there is no going back. Are you prepared to go all the way with this, Alexei?
• Stellaris: While much of the game thrives off of moral relativism or just being evil for the fun of it, there are nonetheless certain actions so unthinkable they will quickly render your entire civilization completely and permanently irredeemable in the eyes of the wider galaxy:
  • The negative diplomatic opinion modifier for genocide can easily end up so severe that it would take several hundred years to normalize relations, often eclipsing the 300-year default campaign length.
  • The Nemesis expansion pushes this into Omnicidal Maniac territory with the Crisis Aspirancy option, a sort of extended galaxy-wide murder-suicide culminating in the simultaneous detonation of every star in the galaxy to empower the Aspirant species to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, an "existential threat" to life as we know it that leaves the Galactic Community no choice but to declare a mutual war of extermination to save the galaxy or get wiped out trying.
• Suikoden:
  • In the first scene of Suikoden II where we see Luca Blight, he has just finished massacring almost all the members of a Youth Brigade camp (read: fantasy Boy Scouts) so that he can frame a neighboring country for the deed and get the people's support for a campaign of slaughter, rape, and pillage. He only gets worse from there.
  • In Suikoden V, the villains had toed the line between reasonable and malicious up until they sent assassins to wipe out the beavers, for no reason other than a desire to remove all ethnic diversity from the kingdom. After that, they were just plain evil.
  • In Suikoden Tierkreis, the Religious Leader Valfred goes too far when he erases a country and his population, The Magedom of Janam, who was opposing him, with Manaril and Shams' family inside it.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: Cackletta and Fawful crossed this when they stormed into Woohoo Hooniversity and forcefully experimented on all of the innocent scientists inside and transformed them into mindless monsters that Mario and Luigi are forced to kill.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: Big Bad Sir Grodus crosses it when he finds out TEC was leaking information about his plan to resurrect the Shadow Queen to Take Over the World to Princess Peach and deletes him in front of her. As the player's guide says: "If you don't feel much animosity toward Sir Grodus at this point, you will by the time the event is over."
    • How about the Arc Villain of Chapter Three, Grubba draining King K. and Bandy Andy of their fighting power and then trapping them under a box in the locked storage room, presumably leaving them to die as he did to many other fighters he also drained to stay young and healthy forever?
    • The true Big Bad of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, the Shadow Queen, crossed it one thousand years ago by destroying the city where Rogueport now stands and forcing the remaining survivors into slavery. She only got worse by spreading her reign of terror, and even after being defeated by four heroes, she cursed them to a Fate Worse than Death. After being revived by Grodus, she possesses Peach and plans to plunge the world once again into darkness.
  • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time: Princess Shroob feeds Peach to Petey Piranha, in front of a crowd of her fellow shroobs. She gets out alive, but still.
  • Super Paper Mario:
    • Dimentio crosses it when he seemingly murders Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Bowser by sending them to the Underwhere all with a Slasher Smile. He just takes it further when it's revealed that he manipulated everyone so he can destroy the universe and remake it, and when he's defeated, tries to destroy everything as an act of spite.
    • Blumiere's father kickstarts the entire plot from behind the scenes far on the other side of this trope before the game begins. When his attempt to end the relationship between his son and Timpani failed, he cursed her to wander between dimensions as a last resort, almost killing her in the process, simply to keep his tribe's magic pure and strong. Deconstructed in that his actions are so atrocious that his son snaps and becomes the Big Bad Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds he is today.
  • Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon: King Boo crosses the line when he destroys the Dark Moon, knowing that he'll force every ghost in Evershade Valley under his control, then creating a portal to unleash an army of ghosts to tear apart the fabric of the universe, and finally by putting Luigi through a horrific experience before they fight and gloating that Luigi, Gadd, and all of their friends are going to suffer the fate Mario did, which he's shown to be perfectly capable of doing.
  • Mario & Luigi: Dream Team: Of all people to cross it, it's Popple, who, after being a mere annoyance in the Wiggler fight, decides to betray Mario and Luigi (his new rookies; It Makes Sense in Context) since they're weakened. Thankfully, the fight and scene afterwards is a much-deserved Humiliation Conga.
    • In the very same game, there's also Antasma who crossed this when he shattered the Dark Stone and caused all of the Pi'illo's to be eternally trapped inside Nightmare Chunks causing either a nasty case of a Fate Worse than Death or a flat-out cultural GENOCIDE.
  • Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam: Bowser, of all Mario villains, finally gets a shot at this, if just for one game; he and his papery Alternate Self both plot to trap the heroes in the Paper Mario universe and destroy it by burning the book, wiping out all of its inhabitants as well as the heroes. In addition, both Bowsers kidnap Toads and force them into slave labor, and destroy Peach's Castle while it's still inhabited, although the consequences of the latter aren't explored much since this is a family-friendly game.
    • Although, for Bowser, this also may have been crossed as early as Super Mario Galaxy, where not only did he plan to destroy and recreate the entire universe, but its takeover was spurred by him stealing the power source for a starship essential to the survival of hundreds of Lumas — read: innocent star babies who have done nothing to him. Granted, Bowser likely didn't know the repercussions of what he was doing when he stole them, but his ignorance still nearly led to the loss of many innocent lives until Mario stepped in.
    • One could even argue that Bowser had already crossed this as early as the very first Super Mario Bros. game where according to the game’s manual, Bowser uses his Black Magic to transform almost all of the Toads of the Mushroom Kingdom into bricks and horsetail plants which either straight up KILLS all of them or puts all of them in an And I Must Scream situation (either one is absolutely terrible). Heck, the whole reason WHY Bowser kidnaps Peach in this game in particular is because she is the only one who can undo the curse that Bowser put on the Toads with her White Magic in the first place so he kidnapped her in order to prevent her from doing so.
  • Paper Mario: The Origami King: If you somehow don’t believe that King Olly already crossed this when he painfully forced and transformed Princess Peach and all of Bowser’s minions into his Folded Soldiers by literally stapling them into his soldiers or when he put all of the Toads in the Mushroom Kingom in an And I Must Scream situation OR when he literally CRUSHED his sister, and also technically his daughter, with a giant boulder in an attempt to brutally murder her then you’ll definitely believe that he finally crossed it when he morphed Peach into a stained glass window and basically KILLED her because of it and decided to use the one-thousandth paper origami crane to kill all Toads in existence just because his creator drew a mere scribble on him. That's right. Olly wanted to commit GENOCIDE on an entire race just because one of said races' members drew on him. Even during his Redemption Equals Death moment, he himself realizes that he has gone too far and cannot come back from all of this and wishes for Olivia to use his dead body as the one-thousandth crane and use it to undo all of his horrific atrocities.
    • In the same game, there is also Scissors who definitely crossed this when it not only sliced up Bowser Jr. and the rest of Bowser's minions into a bunch of pieces, but also put many of the minions' sliced up faces onto the Paper Mistake Buzzy Beetle.
  • Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope: Cursa crossed this when it decided to possess Rosalina and then sadistically used her body to painfully drain the life out of and kill all of the Sparks, who were all basically her own adopted children, purely out of spite.
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation kind of... subverts this. Wilhelm von Juergen might've come across as sympathetic. He simply couldn't bear the thought of being unable to protect his family and humanity from aliens, so he created a system that unites humanity by force. That may be stupid, but... good intentioned... wait a minute, what's that?! He just... killed Lamia out of cold blood, after he completely wrecked her physically, while she's battered and defenseless!? That's the last line of sympathy he can get. Forever, he shall be known as an unsympathetic Big Bad Wannabe.
  • Kyosuke's Evil Twin Beowulf crossed it big time during The Anime of the Game (Inspectors). His first on-screen appearance consists of him brutally slaying the Shadow Mirror version of Team SRX, ripping the SRX into pieces, and then he killed a defenseless Ryusei Date stuck in the destroyed R-1. All with a Slasher Smile on his face. He never did that in the actual game, and it does show that Beowulf is NOT heroic. At all. Rai had already died during the Black Hole incident, so someone else must've been piloting R-2.
  • Mizal crossed it when he orchestrates Altis' death in Super Robot Wars Compact 3; Fernando and Maysis concurs.
  • Shikuu crosses it in Third Super Robot Wars Z: Jigoku-hen when he kills the pregnant Annalotta Stohls, causing the Geminides race to go extinct, as the mother is the one who spreads her genes.
• The "Children of Tarrone" in the eighth mission of SWAT 4. Seems like your standard doomsday cult until you get to the basement and find that they willingly killed their children and tore up the concrete floor to bury them.
• LeChuck crosses it in a big way at the end of episode 4 of Tales of Monkey Island, when he stabs Guybrush in the stomach, killing him.
  • What makes this Moral Event Horizon even worse? He spent four episodes of the series lying that he was reformed, then, when he got the chance, murdered the person who was starting to consider him a comrade.
  • Before then, his sadistic torture of Guybrush in the final areas of Monkey Island 2.
• In TaskMaker, the eponymous ruler assigns the player a series of Fetch Quests to claim various items throughout the land, and he rewards the player in some way after each item is returned. After the 9th task, the TaskMaker rewards the player with "DRUGS!!", a useless item that will send the player to Hell if used, and demands his final task — to kill a prisoner. Should you visit the prison, you'd find that the prisoner has a Good alignment, so killing him will cause the player to lose a lot of points and some Spirit. Returning to the TaskMaker after killing the prisoner will result in him mocking you, followed by a Game Over.
• In Tears to Tiara 2, Abraxas releasing the King of Death marks the Moral Event Horizon. Before that, The Empire was just trying to brutally crush a rebellion. After that, it was worse than genocidal. Abraxas was effectively trying to kill as many people as possible, regardless of whose side they are on.
• In Terraria, the player character. In order to progress to the endgame, you must summon a boss in the Underworld, and in order to do so, you must murder the Guide with the Guide Voodoo Doll. As of 1.1, it's clear that death is not cheap for the non-player character allies, as when they die, they are not resurrected, but rather replaced, and thus this amounts to murdering the Guide simply to progress in the game.
  Voodoo Doll Description, before you even use it: You are a terrible person.
• Wild Dog from Time Crisis really crosses the Horizon when he shoots Rachel and wounds her while she's fleeing from him, and while Miller cradles her wounded body, Wild Dog laughs as he starts fighting with Miller.
  • Giorgio Zott in 3 had his moment when he tried to execute Daniel, Alicia's brother, during a confrontation with Alan and Wesley.
  • The Big Bad of 3's Rescue Mission mode, Jake Hernandez, immediately crosses it during the first boss battle with him in the city. He grabs a young girl and an elderly woman and uses them as hostages. As for the elderly woman, what does Jake do to her? He throws her to the floor and kicks her on the back.
  • Gregory Barrows' endgame in 4 was when he tried to nuke the entire United States.
  • In the fifth game, it turns out that Robert Baxter went rogue on the VSSE by selling out their Intel to terrorist organizations around the world. Three months before the events of the game, he killed Christy Ryan, the Damsel in Distress from the second game who had been investigating the traitor's identity. He then proceeded to frame his ex-partner Keith Martin as the traitor and Christy's murderer. Note that Christy Ryan happened to be Keith's girlfriend.
  • Paulo Guerra's fate was sealed in the console port of Razing Storm when he tied Hunt to a missile and then wired a detonator inside the man to force the heroes to shoot him to stop the missile.
• In the first game of the Trauma Center series, it's already pretty enraging that a fanatic unknown organization is threatening the lives of the innocent and the main character's beloved ones with their parasites for no good reason. But wait until the last part of the game, when you discover that they were making their experiments with GUILT on innocent children they kidnapped around the world! Add this up to some calculation: considering the speed at which GUILT kills the host, and the fact that the children were being used as incubators, with highly concentrated strains of the parasites, imagine the sheer number of kids dead in the hands of Delphi and you have a good example of Fridge Horror.

U - Z

• ULTRAKILL: Hell already proved itself as a vile, depraved villain of unimaginable cruelty by slaughtering the human race to claim their souls and torture them for all eternity out of sadistic pleasure. But if an atrocity like this didn't cross the line for some players, then maybe its cruel treatment of one of its Demons will, such as leaving The Minotaur to rot in the Garden of Forking Paths for a millennia before crushing its Tragic Dream of seeing the sky one last time by leading it to the level exit before immediately closing the exit doors it just opened, forcing it in a losing battle against V1 where the Minotaur dies with regret for failing its dream. Hell is so evil that not even its own Demons are safe from its cruelty.
• There are two points in Undertale that can be considered this for the player, both involving the already horrific Genocide path, during which you have multiple opportunities to get off of (albeit with most of the cast being understandably furious at you.) The true point-of-no-return, however, is at Hotland/The Core near the end of the game. You'll kill Mettaton NEO despite whatever you do; however, if you don't kill everyone else beforehand, the game considers that the protagonist lacks the conviction to truly carry out the rest of the slaughter, and boots them off the Genocide path into a Neutral path. Satisfying the kill quota, however, will lock you into the Genocide path for the rest of the game, and only resetting will stop it. The second, far more meta MEH is actually completing the Genocide path, resulting in the First Child erasing all of existence and forcing the player to sell their soul to reset everything, which permanently taints the game, even if the player achieves the Golden Ending later.
  • In between those two points, Sans will pretend to spare you during his boss fight, saying that he still thinks there's good in you. He's lying. If you take the bait, he locks you into an unavoidable One-Hit Kill and then mocks you from the Game Over screen. Bonus irony points because that's probably how you killed his brother, Papyrus, back when he was genuinely trying to spare you.
  • Another meta-MEH is killing Toriel by sparing her until she stops attacking you, and then attacking when her guard is down. This is not required to get the Genocide ending, so the only reason to do this is sheer sadism.
  • Killing Papyrus is considered to be the player character's MEH in-universe. Unlike every other character in the game, Papyrus is an utter goofball who is absolutely no threat to you; he will only capture you if he defeats you, and he even tries to draw out your conscience by sparing you on the Genocide route. Undyne and Sans in particular will never forgive you if you kill Papyrus.
• Uplink features an in-universe example of this if you hack into Uplink, steal the Agent list that reveals the real identities of every Agent under Uplink's employ, and sell it off. After an outbreak of Agent suicides (or "suicides",) you're given the Neuromancer rating of Sociopath, which you can't change for the rest of the game.
• Lezard Valeth of Valkyrie Profile is one nasty piece of work and crosses the line many times (especially in the sequel/prequel), but very early on, he crosses the Moral Event Horizon when he orchestrates the deaths of his former teacher, Lorenta, and her husband by giving the latter a potion that turns the drinker into a monster. Lorenta's husband begs her to kill him before he succumbs to its effect, but Lorenta can't bring herself to do it. He then turns into a monster and kills her. All of this was to draw the attention of the protagonist, Lenneth Valkyrie. Lezard claims he needed a sacrifice of lovers to lure the goddess to him and chose his former teacher because she and her husband had a "lifetime of love."
• In The Walking Dead, Lilly crosses this when she murders Carley or Doug in cold blood.
  • Provided the player saved Doug rather than Carley, the scene plays out somewhat differently, in that Lilly's anger is directed almost entirely at Ben, and she is only annoyed by Doug's attempts at mediation. Eventually, she aims her handgun at Ben, who Doug pulls out of the way, taking the bullet himself, instead. Lilly is visibly horrified by the accidental murder, though it can still be argued as a Moral Event Horizon given it was still a result of Lilly's "guilty until proven innocent" attitude. However: no one who has witnessed her murder Carley considers her sympathetic.
  • Kenny crosses this if you side with Lilly in the meat locker. After Larry has a heart attack and Lee goes to help out, Kenny smashes Larry's head in with a salt lick.
    • This one may be debatable, considering that there's no way to know if Larry is truly dead or if he could be resuscitated. If it was the former, he would come back as a walker, which, considering that the group is in an enclosed space with no weapons, was something Kenny was trying to avoid.
  • In Episode 5, No Time Left, Lee talks to a man (dubbed simply "The Stranger") whom you and your group accidentally screwed over, and who was going after you for revenge. While you can sympathize with him, he admits that if Clementine, who he, for all and intents and purposes, kidnapped, were to go with Lee again, he would kill her himself. And depending on how you interpret him, he's probably not even doing this for Clementine's sake no matter how much he says he is, he's just trying to find someone else to blame for his own mistakes.
  • In the third episode of Season Two, Carver spends pretty much the entire episode pole-vaulting right the fuck over the horizon.
• In We Happy Few, England was invaded by the Germans in World War II, and the people of Wellington Wells did... something, something truly horrific to save themselves. Whatever this "Very Bad Thing" was, it worked, but the survivors were so wracked with guilt that they rebuilt their entire society around voluntary Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul and trying to forget what they did, just to avoid complete societal collapse. Making it all the more tragic was that the Very Bad Thing was surrendering to German forces and giving up all their children under a certain age to horrific experimentation. It was a Senseless Sacrifice in many ways, because not only was the "army" a paper tiger composed of papier-mache tanks, but the children who were taken away died in a horrible train wreck on the way to the English mainland.
• Kartikeya of Wild ARMs 5 seems at first to be your typical Psycho for Hire, first shown killing enemy troops after they'd already surrendered, nothing too special here. An element of It's Personal is introduced when Greg reveals that Kartikeya killed his wife and son for no real reason, but that's still on this side of the line. When Greg finally does confront him? Kartikeya has no idea who Greg is, and has to have the whole incident retold for him to remember it at all. The man brutally destroys lives so casually that there is simply no telling how many people he's murdered for a laugh. The Moral Event Horizon is now crossed.
  • Alhazad from Wild ARMs is even worse. He's a Mad Scientist who experiments on humans, turning them into monsters and even demons. He crosses the line when he experiments on Court Seim, a town populated mostly by orphaned children. When your party faces him towards the end, he outright admits his many atrocities were done purely for fun. It's little wonder in the remake Cecilia outright states he's the only one she's fought with outright hatred in her heart.
• Blood and Wine, the second expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has a rare example of this happening with an Anti-Villain. Dettlaff van der Eretain is a Higher Vampire who can't adjust himself to human society due to his animalistic mentality but is very loyal to those that are nice to him. Despite being responsible for killing four knights, the story portrays him as a complicated and sympathetic villain who detests having to kill these knights but has to do so because his lover was kidnapped. Rescuing her will probably stop him from killing more people. However, once it has been revealed that said lover was the one manipulating him into killing, Dettlaff completely loses it and decides to raze the city of Beauclair to the ground with an army of vampires. Regis, another Higher Vampire who defended Detlaff throughout the game, treats this as Detlaff's Moral Event Horizon, saying he does no longer condone his actions. Should the player decide to fight Dettlaff, it is Regis who delivers the final blow, despite his deep friendship with Dettlaff.
• Ellen of The Witch's House crosses it with her entire Grand Theft Me scheme involving Viola, which she pulled off in a way that ensured that Viola would suffer absolutely horribly all the while she was in Ellen's former body. And to put the icing on the cake, she tricks Viola's own father into shooting down his own daughter in the end when Viola comes after her, wanting her body back.
• Metal Face/Mumkhar from Xenoblade Chronicles 1 almost crossed the MEH when he coldly killed Fiora, Shulk's Childhood Friend when she bravely (if not recklessly) entered the battle against the Mechon to protect her friends; but he unequivocally crossed it in his next appearance when he mocked Shulk's pleas not to kill Fiora in front of him, Reyn and Dunban, the last one being Fiora's brother. The sickening pleasure Metal Face took in the pain he caused them by killing Fiora cemented him as an irredeemable monster. When his true identity as Dunban's former war buddy Mumkhar is revealed, he can claim to have crossed the MEH shortly after the events of the Battle of Sword Valley, when he defected to the Mechon out of nothing more than petty jealousy that Dunban could wield the Monado and wanting it for himself.
• Xenogears
  • It's probably difficult to name an exact moment when Miang Hawwa crossed the MEH because there's so many, but the earliest is probably the Zeboim War: she successfully agitates for an apocalyptic nuclear war purely for reasons of eugenics and wiping out the existing "defective" human population to make better parts for Deus.
  • While the game portrays Cain's/the Gazel Ministry's killing the first Abel as their MEH, their actual MEH is the establishment of The Holy Empire of Solaris, which proceeds to rule over the rest of humanity as its chattel slaves and food and fuel supply while working toward the resurrection of Deus.
  • Krelian's true crossing of the MEH moment is as debatable as Miang's for the same reason (there's so many places...), but he himself acknowledges that he has and that he cannot return to humanity after having been the Man Behind the Man of Solaris, and the death and destruction he and his experiments have wrought.
  • Isaac Stone's is either using the young Ethos priests/acolytes for his pleasures or murdering Racquel out of revenge, then raising Billy as a "kindly benefactor." Both can work.
  • Shakhan's is not only betraying Aveh to Solaris but brutally beating two children and trying to kill them just because they were rightful heirs to the kingdom.
• Lieutenant Virgil from Xenosaga was a Jerkass from the start, but he crosses the Moral Event Horizon when he blows up some Realians for no better reason than that there's some chance it might buy some time and talks cheerfully about how he loves eating their flesh. When he dies shortly thereafter, Shion still cares, but the player most likely doesn't.
  • In the third game, his abject hatred of Realians and his cannibalistic tendencies are made a bit more forgivable when you learn about his backstory with Febronia. His final scene in particular almost tips him into Jerkass Woobie territory... for some, anyway.
    • His cannibalism due to DME addiction may be a side effect of Febronia donating her organs to him.
  • Albedo. He kidnaps MOMO, proceeds to subject her to some horror involving self-mutilation and regeneration, then mind-rapes her to get the Y data. While doing so, he plants some kind of mind-bomb in her so that when the heroes try to get the Y data later, it more or less makes her mind asplode. And despite all this, he's still one of the most popular characters.
• The space combat simulator X-Wing Alliance had a richer plot and cast of characters than its predecessors, particularly a subplot involving the protagonist Ace Azzameen's family. When Ace is new to piloting for his father Tomaas' shipping company, he helps out with a covert delivery of bacta to the wounded soldiers from Hoth, only for the Empire to show up and destroy the freighter that Ace's father and eldest brother were on. Their uncle Anton helps them escape to the Rebel Alliance. Near the end of the game, Anton gives them information that indicates that Tomaas and Galin are alive on an Imperial prison station. When the Azzameen children go to rescue them, Imperial ships arrive to capture them. They learn that their dear Uncle Anton not only set them up but told the Empire about Tomaas' bacta run way back when. To recap, the man sold his own brother and niece and nephews out to the Empire, all because he figured Tomaas' dealings with rebels would ruin their business.

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