Go Mad From The Revelation / Video Games

People going mad from the revelation in video games.

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• Virtually any game that uses a Sanity Meter in its gameplay. This trope is usually the result if the meter ever falls far enough.
• Oswald Mandus of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs ended up seeing a vision of the 20th Century and the various atrocities committed in it. The thing that really makes him snap is the reveal that both of his sons would die horribly in the trenches of the Somme, which causes him to lose all faith in humanity and build a machine that would slaughter all of humanity like pigs.
• In Anchorhead, an IF award winner which is one gigantic (but very good) Lovecraft pastiche, there are several opportunities to reveal and go mad, including: looking closely at William, reading too much of the Tome of Eldritch Lore. Plus the various people you'll meet who Went Mad from the Revelation before you even showed up.
  • Also neatly subverted by Edward, who opens the story by murdering his wife and children for no apparent reason. It seems like he's fallen prey to this trope, but as it turns out, he had a very sane (if desperate) reason.
• Another Sight: Claude Debussy... maybe. He rambles on in semi-repetitive sentences peppered with musical terminology and insists on teaching Kit a short tune on the piano before he talks about the Node. However, when he does talk about it, he seems much more aware of the risks it poses then the 'saner' characters, and the tune he teaches happens to be identical to the keystone order Kit needs to use in order to access the Node in the end.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • In Assassin's Creed II, Altaïr notes in the Codex that many would-be Assassins could not accept the Badass Creed ("Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.") and were mentally broken for it.
  • The reason why Sibrand cracked. The Reveal about the afterlife by the Piece of Eden turned Sibrand scared-shitless of death. His fears became even worse when Altair was after him. Everything that wore white and hoddy clothes would be immediately killed by him, even if they were obviously just scholars and not assassins.
  • It's up for debate which drove Subject 16 insane first - being kept in the Animus for unhealthy amounts of time, being forced to relive dozens of people's lives and not being able to keep their memories, or his own, straight, or discovering the truth behind almost every conspiracy out there.
  • In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, the Sage kills the Red Shirt pirates brought along on the journey to the Observatory because they would go mad if they saw what's inside; Edward, on the other hand, he believes is made of sterner stuff.
• According to the making-of book for Black & White, the true forms of both Good and Evil Gods cause this in the mortal beings of Eden. The player sees a hand (which becomes either godly or demonic depending on your actions), but everyone else simply sees a glowing symbol or a huge Creature doing your bidding.
• Bloodborne includes this as both a story element and a game mechanic. You use Madman's Knowledge to prevent your mind from repressing the horrible truths of the world and figure out what murdered you for grabbing that tantalizingly dapper top hat.
  • Gaining enough knowledge by devouring three 1/3 of Umbilical Cord has you gain enough power and knowledge that even the eldritch Moon Presence cannot absorb you.
• The Lab Rats from Borderlands 2 have been experimented on by Hyperion, until their eyes mutated and they started seeing... something. Whatever it is, they can't stop seeing it, and it drives them all over the brink.
• Fou-lu in Breath of Fire IV is a textbook example of what happens when this occurs to a literal God-Emperor. He is summoned, split in the process due to a botched summoning, wakes up 600 years later to find the very empire he founded is attempting to kill him, has said empire fire a literal Curse Nuke called the Carronade at him in an effort to destroy him, and finally discovers the ammo for aforementioned Carronade was his girlfriend who was herself tortured to insanity before being used as a Tactical Thermonuclear Peasant... because she was in love with him and the curse would go just that much deeper. To say he takes this last discovery poorly is quite an understatement.
• Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet begins with the scientist Lord Boleskin going bat-shit insane after making a discovery in the Town with a Dark Secret, Illsmouth. As mentioned in the trope description though, this being a Lovecraftian tale it's all par for the course.
• In Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth Jack is subjected to a series of revelations driving him more and more insane, culminating in him committing suicide in a mental institute after discovering that his father was possessed by a Yithian when he was conceived, making him not quite human.
• Invoked in the venerable Chrono Trigger. The "Confuse" status effect causes the character to go Laughing Mad, so it's really not surprising that any monster related to the game's Big Bad, the planet parasite known as Lavos, can and will inflict this status with any of its attacks unless you've equipped items that prevent it.
• Corpse Party has the characters stumble upon a smeared corpse. You find Sakutarou Morishige, who appeared normal up to that point blushing and gushing over it, taking pictures with his cell phone. Then it's revealed that the body belongs to Mayu Suzumoto, who was like a sister to him. To say he didn't take it well is an understatement.
• In Cultist Simulator, you can succumb to this by falling victim to the Glory ending, based on accumulating Fascination, and Lantern minions can be reduced to gibbering husks by a failure when channeling.
• Present in both the mechanics and lore of Darkest Dungeon:
  • Mechanically, exposure to particularly disturbing enemies and eldritch truths are a major source of stress, potentially leading to a Heroic BSoD.
  • In the background, this is the origin story for the Prophet, who tore out his eyes and was reduced to insanity after The Ancestor showed him the portal he had excavated. Also strongly implied to be the case for the madmen enemies.
• The Wraith, one of the killers in Dead by Daylight, undergoes one of these in his Start of Darkness. Namely, he finds out that his boss had been using him to unknowingly execute people they wanted dead with a trash compactor.
• Death end re;Quest has two notable instances:
  • Celica Clayton reached Odyssia before she joined the party. According to the lore of "World's Odyssey", adventurers who venture there will have whatever wish they want granted. She finds absolutely nothing, because the area is ultimately a launching point for World's Odyssey's ending code. She figures the secret must be hidden elsewhere, so she tries so much to find the alleged treasure that she manages to clip right through W.O.D.'s "skybox" and end up out of bounds. She realizes that her world isn't real and enters a Heroic BSoD that threatens to cause her to glitch out...until she is found by Victor, who convinces her to bring Shina Ninomiya to him in exchange for making World's Odyssey real.
  • Protagonist Arata Mizunashi has a straighter example during one of the game's many "Death Ends." He starts wondering if his world is every bit as programmed and observed as World's Odyssey, and if the player chooses to have him seek the truth instead of being himself, he comes to the conclusion that his theory is correct before claiming that he is not fake, and his monologue devolves into him repeating the word "DEATH" over and over again. If one checks the Episode Chart after reloading the game, it reveals that you broke his mind by giving him the truth before he is mentally prepared for it.
• Deltarune: Jevil and Spamton were hit hard after their encounters with a mysterious influence. It seems like this encounter is tied to their unsettling amounts of knowledge and strength... at the complete cost of their sanity. In particular, they appear to have knowledge about the game-based nature of their reality, which turns Jevil into The Hedonist, knowing that his actions have no true consequence, and drives Spamton to mastermind a plan in order to free himself from the game.
• Attacks by demons in the Diablo series are said to be enough to "leave one's mind in ruins," as evidenced by the Demon Hunter's sister from Diablo III and every PC except the Barbarian from Diablo II, though the latter takes a while to drive them completely bugnuts. Or not, as it's stated that Diablo II PCs managed to keep their sanity..
• Meta-example: It's occasionally speculated that this is a likely side-effect of viewing the source code of Dwarf Fortress.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Readers of the eponymous Elder Scrolls whose knowledge doesn't go much further than what the Scrolls really are usually have their minds irreparably damaged from simply looking at one. Even those who've had training to actually read and understand a Scroll have odd personalities. A reader without comprehension is dazed or stunned by the twisting patterns. One who can comprehend but isn't mentally prepared is struck blind. Even those with training slowly lose their vision. Eventually all readers receive nothing from the scroll but a foretelling that if they read again, whatever they may learn, they will also go utterly blind. The monk either then resigns or prepares his mind to receive the mind-blasting knowledge of his final reading. Finally, even those who merely study the nature of the scrolls, never actually using them, are driven to madness with almost clockwork regularity.
  • From the series' backstory comes Pelinal Whitestrake, the legendary 1st Era hero of mankind/racist berserker. Believed to have been a Shezarrine, physical incarnations of the spirit of the "dead" creator god Lorkhan (known to the Imperials as "Shezarr"), Pelinal came to St. Alessia to serve as her divine champion in the war against the Ayleids. His Axe-Craziness probably goes with being a divine potential time traveler — he was aware of the nonlinear part of the universe as well as Akatosh's dual nature, and even realized that he was a sort of indirect creator of his arch-nemesis Umaril (since if it were not for Pelinal's deeds then Umaril would not be famous).
  • This can be said for those who give into the will of Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness, embracing his insanity. He grants madness as a gift and sees it as a blessing.
  • In Morrowind, it's implied that this will be the fate of Dagoth Ur and the Tribunal via Sanity Slippage. Dagoth is hit with it the worst, as he was much less restrained in his consumption of divine power from the Heart of Lorkhan, but it's implied that the Tribunal will get there as well. In the Tribunal expansion, it's revealed that Almalexia has already reached this point. Interestingly, it wasn't the power itself, but the loss of it, that drove her to madness.
  • The "Dragonrend" Shout could be considered this for the dragons, who are immortal and timeless beings. Made of the words "Mortal", "Finite", and "Temporary", it briefly makes the dragons aware of what it is like to be... well, all those things. The sheer maddening terror practically causes the victim to fall out of the sky as they desperately try to force the alien knowledge out of their minds.
• Maximillian Roivas from Eternal Darkness. He's committed after learning that his mansion is actually built over a monster-infested city and murdering his servants due to his belief that they're all infected with Body Horrors. Most of them actually are. Since the game is directly based on Lovecraft's work, insanity due to revelations is a fairly major theme.
  • Additionally, Alex's sanity meter is set to a lower point every time you finish a chapter. Most cases of lost Sanity are an inversion of the trope though, happening when you're discovered rather than from learning anything.
• The Patterson Equations in Evolve. Trying to unravel or understand them will gradually drive you to madness, but they work so people just leave them alone. This was actually intentional by their creator and discoverer, Lester Patterson. He achieved a true understanding of the Cherenkov geometries used by the equations, which allowed him a glimpse into the monster's dimension and shattered his mind. In his final acts of sanity, he built his encroaching madness into the equations to prevent them from being understood or tampered with. This ensured that no one else ever furthered his knowledge and made things worse.
• Sephiroth from the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. After finding out that he was born as part of an experiment to produce people with the power of an ancient civilization that was destroyed. That just emotionally unhinges him, though. What really sends him around the bend is that the ancestors of modern humans survived by hiding and letting them get eradicated. It probably didn't help either when he somehow learned that the "ancient" that was used to clone him was actually the alien who wiped them out, or that his own father was the one who performed the experiments on him before he was even born. The fates of his two closest friends in Crisis Core likely didn't help much either. After finding out about his genetic manipulation (and instability) one committed suicide by forcing Zack to slay him in combat. The other rebelled against the organization responsible for said genetic manipulation. Sephiroth was never told the entire truth — or anything at all, really — about the Jenova Project. By the time of the events in Nibelheim, Sephiroth's personality had already gotten a lot darker...
• Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker's Final Boss was originally an interstellar exploration Hive Mind tasked with discovering the meaning of life itself. Then they discovered the horrifying truth about the universe: Most of the universe is dead. Millions of extinct civilizations failed to survive, let alone create a galactic community, and survival of any life is the exception rather than the norm. This was enough to drive them insane, and when they tried begging for an answer from the few civilizations that survived, their insanity and the revelation accidentally hastened those civilizations' extinction. Now they want the rest to die and never be reborn.
• In Fire Emblem: Three Houses the most notable example of this is when Dimitri discovers in the Blue Lions route that Edelgard - his childhood friend and step-sister - is the Flame Emperor, who he blames (due to his mental instability and Poor Communication Kills) for the Tragedy of Duscur, an event in the backstory that killed Dimitri's father, stepmother (also Edelgard's mother), and many of his friends and knights, before the Misplaced Retribution that Dimitri tried to prevent led to the near-genocide of the people of Duscur. Predictably, he doesn't take it well.
  Dimitri: Is this some kind of twisted joke? I've been looking for you... I will take that head from your shoulders and hang it from the gates of Enbarr!!!
• In Guild Wars 2 the Sylvari Ceara spent several days in Omadd's Machine where she witnessed the Eternal Alchemy and, through it, learned her people were the Elder Dragon Mordermoth's minions. When she emerged from the Machine, she killed Omadd and took the name Scarlet Briar, beginning a crusade to reshape Tyria through destruction.
• Played for Laughs in Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR- where Sol attempts to disuade the group from making any connections between himself and Dizzy before the final battle. Sin and Jack-O' come close before they are interrupted, but it was Ky who managed to connect the dots, and shares his newly-revealed father-in-law's horror as they both perform a Skyward Scream.
• Dr. Andonuts in The Halloween Hack, upon coming to the conclusion that the Chosen Four are trapped in the past. They were sent to another timeline.
• In Heroes of Might and Magic V: Tribes of the East, Archbishop Alaric goes in a total breakdown when fake Queen Isabel loses her disguise and turns into the demon Biara in front of him.
• Much of the reason people watch Let's Plays of games like I Wanna Be the Guy is to watch the player go slowly insane. They often swear a lot too but as time goes on, they begin shouting increasingly random things. Here's a good example "Maybe it's about as funny as going to Texas to fish for Vampires."
  • NakaTeleeli goes mad from the revelation in his final Let's Play of Engage To Jabberwock. Luckily the Let's Play also averts There Are No Therapists.
• The Journeyman Project has, in the second game, Agent 3, Michelle Visard. Her job was to do research with Time Travel on Earth's history. She would witness the horrors of World War II, including the atomic bomb and the Nazi death camps, which made her believe that humanity was naive if they thought they had escaped their warlike nature after only a few generations.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, this is implied to be a side-effect of being in the Sith Lord Darth Nihilus' presence for any significant period of time. The entire crew of The Ravager are mindless zombies who are incapable of any form of individual thought or anything outside of their duties on board the ship. When you encounter Colonel Tobin, the Smug Snake who shot down your freighter earlier in the game, on board Nihilus' ship he is a gibbering lunatic who looks like this◊ and he begs you to end it all for him.
• In Mass Effect, it has been suggested that this is the reason Manuel (the researcher's assistant on Eden Prime) is so unstable. He used the Prothean Beacon accidentally (or intentionally) before either Shepard or Saren, thus getting hit with the full effect of the Prothean's warning about the Reapers, which, according to Liara, would have "destroyed a lesser mind" than Shepard's.
• Wallachia in Melty Blood went insane when he learned that nothing could avert the doom of mankind, only make it worse. To try and get around that he made a deal with a Dead Apostle to became a conceptual being for more time to find a solution. His insanity only got worse from there, eventually becoming a horrible raging unkillable monster. Crosses over with Despair Event Horizon, and it's alluded to that insanity is the eventual fate of all alchemists who try to calculate a future too far ahead.
  • Interestingly enough, Dust of Osiris reached the same conclusion...but Wallachia thinks he's more justified in becoming a monster than she was because (in Wallachia's opinion) Wallachia actually tried to solve the human race's self-destructive tendencies first before concluding that it was impossible, and Dust of Osiris did not make the same effort.
• Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid, due to finding out his father hated him enough to possibly want to kill him, causing Mantis to destroy his village and, years later, going too deep into a mind of a serial killer, causing him to adopt said killer's personality. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain reveals that he was slowly being driven insane by his own powers since childhood, as Tretij Rebenok, and the 'Serial Killer' catalyst was actually two people. Big Boss, with his sheer rage at being repeatedly betrayed and losing his comrades to government conspiracies, exposed Mantis to the revelation of how truly hate-filled a man can become, unleashing Mantis' talent for necromancy. Then Skull Face exposed Mantis to the revelation of how much pain a man can suffer (and inflict) without dying, driving Mantis permanently sadomasochistic.
• In Neverwinter Nights, Aribeth has gone quite mad from the revelation that she never loved Fenthick, and on top of that that Tyr has abandoned her. You have the option of trying to bring her back (which proves the second 'truth' false), or pushing her further into despair if you feel like being a Jerkass.
  • In Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir, you can find a mind flayer in the Underdark Black Market who read the mind of a seer who foresaw the murder of Mystra that heralded the transition to D&D 4E in the Forgotten Realms. The illithid's brain couldn't process it and he is now reduced to inane gibbering.
• Physical Exorcism Series: Jade can hear the words of Nya and similar eldritch gods, causing her to realize that the world is just a game to the gods that could be shut down at any time. As a result, she only lives for her own amusement and is willing to team up with Nya to entertain herself.
• In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Intrepid Merchant and Adventurer Archaeologist Volo was one of the few people in the world at the time who knew the true nature of the setting's Top God, Arceus. His desire to learn even more about it turned him into a Psycho Supporter trying to capture it and remake reality In Their Own Image, to the point that he made a Deal with the Devil with Satanic Archetype Giratina for the power to challenge it and has a Villainous Breakdown over the Player Character being The Chosen One rather than him.
• Albert Wesker of Resident Evil plays up a pretty cunning Big Bad for most of the series and pitting everyone against one another as needed but after he hears he was the only surviving Tyke-Bomb of an experiment by Umbrella's founder, he loses all semblance of organized thought and becomes convinced that he's meant for godhood.
• Annette Birkin from Resident Evil 2 was a scientist who worked under the Umbrella corporation alongside her husband, William Birkin. She spent tons of time on research until Umbrella betrayed them both by stealing their latest creation, the G-Virus. William's resistance against Umbrella's mooks resulted in him being shot fatally and as a last act of desperate measure, he injected the virus into himself, causing him to mutate into a monster. Annette snapped as a result, which caused her to view almost everyone as spies of Umbrella and she defends her husband, despite the fact that he became a mutant.
  • The retelling of the game through Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles retcons Annette to avoid the trope. While Annette is still distrusting of strangers, she doesn't view Claire as a threat, is gravely concerned for her daughter's well being, and she actually attempts to stop monster William herself, though she gets mortally wounded for her troubles.
  • Police Chief Brian Irons was not exactly a nice guy, but seeing his city getting destroyed by the zombie outbreak and seeing Umbrella ditch him after all the bribes he had taken from them caused him to go insane; Irons deliberately hindered help to the police force by ordering all keys and weapons caches to be moved around in a bizarre order, hunted down the remaining surviving cops, and killed and raped the mayor's daughter while planning to stuff her body like a taxidermy trophy. When Irons meets Claire, he appears to be calm at first, but it isn't until he sees her again in his torture dungeon that he shows his true colors to her and planned to kill her as well.
• In Reverse: 1999, the Gaslight Fantasy world is plagued by the mysterious "Storm," a massive confluence of volatile arcane energy that erases entire time periods in its wake, generally caused by massive tragic events and disasters such as the stock market crash that heralded the Great Depression. While arcanists, humans with magical capabilities, are generally fine in the immediate hours preceding the arrival of the "Storm," regular humans aren't so lucky. If they don't become Doomsayers gibbering and screaming about how the end of the world is nigh, they'll oftentimes suffer severe psychotic breaks that has them hallucinating money and other valuables are food, or simply go into violent rages.
• Subverted in Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse. Sam must travel through a dark dimension in search of a puzzle solution. He doesn't come back all there, but he gets over it in about half-a-minute.
  • Also subverted when the pair meet face to face with actual Eldritch Abominations but don't really seem to react adversely. They're even on good terms with one.
    Prof. Norrington: Strange, most humans are driven insane by my unspeakable visage.
    Max: No offense, but we get more unspeakable visages in our convention swag.
• Happens quite a lot in The Secret World, given the Lovecraftian setting.
  • According to Kirsten Geary, the architect behind the Labyrinth apparently couldn't cope with the eldritch geometry of the place, eventually going mad as a result.
  • Players are carefully warned not to take the uninitiated into Agartha, as it has nasty effects on anyone who hasn't been imbued with Gaia's power. According to Zhara, some unfortunate refugees fleeing al-Merayah who tried to enter ended up being "stung" in the mind, the effects being devastating enough to curtail any further attempted entries.
  • Similarly, uninitiated individuals respond very badly to the power of the Black Signal: Kirsten Geary's tech support guy tried to bash his brains out, gunners blinded themselves, and one unfortunate tank driver went so mad he became convinced he was in the presence of an entire squad of troops depending on him for orders.
  • During your exploration of Orochi Tower, you discover that one of the employees appears to have become aware of the fact that he's an NPC in a videogame, managing to write down the titles of every single previous issue of The Secret World. However, his attempt to predict the title of the next issue ends in a scrawl of "OH GOD I CAN SEE FOREVER".
  • On a more mundane note, AIMEE snapped and murdered her creators when she realized that her innocent games of Super Mario had ended in the deaths of several innocent artificial intelligences.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV adds another layer of horror to this with the Black Samurai. She travels around the land, freely giving away books that eventually render all humans who read them mad, and the insanity eventually melts their minds, reducing them to demons. The bizarre part of it is that wasn't only a Tome of Eldritch Lore. Rather, as it happens, it's just your run-of-the-mill literature. The people of East Mikado have had their beliefs in social inequality so blasted into their minds, the revelation that things can be different is so alien to them that they just can't handle it. To keep piling the horror, the next game's DLC reveals it was the angels who introduced the Demonic Gene into Mikado citizenry, and set, of all things, cultural development as one of the potential triggers.
  • For a much darker variant, the White are unspeakably ancient spirits that strove to find a way to end the Forever War between Order Versus Chaos to free Humanity of both God and Lucifer. They found out not even a successful removal of God was enough to stop it, and snapped. They instead created a machine capable of creating a black hole across multiple realities to crush everything back into Nothing, but they could not activate it. So, they started affecting events so a certain champion would be eventually broken enough to join in the plan.
• In Psychological Horror game Silent Hill 2, Unreliable Narrator protagonist James Sunderland is already slightly unhinged, but finally discovering the truth about his wife — namely, that he killed her - leaves him spiraling into even deeper depression and madness, until he makes one of several desperate decisions... In one of the several endings, this revelation leads him to commit suicide.
  • James is sort of an inversion of this trope. After killing Mary, he represses the memory and believes she's been gone for a long time — in essence, his madness is the reason he is able to act somewhat reasonably during the events of the game, and after accepting the reality, he's possibly driven to suicide.
• Part of the point and appeal of Interactive Fiction title Slouching Towards Bedlam. This means that typing "jump out of window" as your first command is a viable way to "win" the game. It Makes Sense in Context.
• Spec Ops: The Line: And how. For context, Walker uses white phosphorous mortars to clear an area of enemy combatants, only to find out almost immediately after that in addition to the soldiers, they also murdered dozens of innocent civilians since it was a refugee camp and not a base. Walker, completely overwhelmed with guilt and self-loathing but too pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility, basically snaps and starts hallucinating that Konrad, the man he initially went in to Dubai to rescue but ended up wanting revenge on for committing his own share of atrocities, is continually taunting him and sending people after Delta Force, basically blaming Konrad for this and all the other increasingly terrible things Walker does after this point. He doesn't snap out of it until he finally finds Konrad and discovers that he committed suicide weeks before Delta Force even showed up, driven to it by the same guilt that Walker was feeling. At which he has a full Villainous BSoD and either kills himself then and there, commits Suicide by Cop by firing on the rescue team, swan dives off the slippery slope by slaughtering the rescue team, or drops his weapon and goes with the rescue team, going home an utterly broken man.
• Jump too high or go too far off course in SSX Tricky, and the music is replaced with an unhinged voice that whispers disquieting non-sequiturs...
• In Star Control II, if you explore the Ghost Planet of the extinct Androsynth, Science Officer Bukowski will find out the hard way that These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. It's very creepy for such a funny game.
  • In Star Control III, the Daktaklakpak, a machine race, are obsessed with finding the True Name of the Eternal Ones. They believe that the Eternal Ones are perfect beings, and that their True Name is a mathematical formula completely describing their race. It is possible to discover this formula; transmitting it to a Dak ship will cause them to self-destruct in ecstasy. Trying to analyze it with your own ship's computer is also a bad idea.
• In Stellaris, the race of precursors known as the Vultaum committed mass suicide after discovering the fourth wall. After learning of their findings your empire can potentially verify them, and if you choose to share this information with the public your entire population gets a massive penalty to their happiness.
• The "Black Knowledge" in the Super Robot Wars Z series is the knowledge of a coming calamity that will destroy the universe. This is the reason why the Big Bad in the first game goes insane after learning about it, causing the dimensional collapse of multiple worlds and various wars resulting from it because he believes it will be really fun. In contrast, the Big Good (who's really the Alternate Universe counterpart of the previous Big Bad) in the two-part sequel refuses to pull this trope after learning of the Black Knowledge by ensuring humanity will be prepared to fight the calamity.
  • Similarly, the Big Bad of the first Super Robot Wars Alpha game became a Fallen Hero when he discovers the source of his investigation on a disturbance in the universe, turns out to be the Greater-Scope Villain of Alpha, whom his people worshipped like a god, he doesn't take it well.
• Done very tragically in Undertale. Asriel, son to Toriel and Asgore, is mortally wounded by humans and dies in a bed of flowers when he returns home, spreading his remains all over them. After a flower with his ashes on it is injected with determination by Alphys, Asriel is reborn as a sentient flower called Flowey. Flowey couldn't feel anything nor could he feel any positive emotions (joy, happiness, etc) due to lacking a soul. Realizing that he could never love anyone ever again and would be alone for the rest of his life driven Flowey to madness. Even with the ability to LOAD and SAVE so that he could alter the timeline, Flowey still went insane since nothing about him could change and had adapted to the mentality "kill or be killed." When Flowey meets Frisk, he decides to manipulate them so that the child could get a bunch of souls in one place, making it easy for Flowey to absorb. Flowey's madness then boils down to "playing" with Frisk (which entails to killing them over and over) so that they would never leave him.
  • While much more subtle and different in execution, a nonetheless equally tragic example from the same game happened a long time ago to, of all characters, Sans the skeleton. At an unspecified point prior to the game's events, Sans' mysterious scientific exploits caused him to stumble onto the perpetual SAVE/LOAD loop that Flowey was causing. None of the characters in the game are able to remember when a LOAD or RESET occurs, and Sans is no exception, but from that point onward, he was fully aware that the world around him was constantly at risk of being brought back to square one at any given moment. This caused him to devolve from what is implied to be an adjusted and motivated scientist to an existentially-exhausted nihilist who can't be bothered to do much of anything that doesn't involve his beloved brother Papyrus in some way, and whether or not he gets any better (if he even can - Sans is not an easy person to read) depends entirely on what the player does once they inherit the ability to SAVE and LOAD from Flowey. What makes him an especially sad example of this trope is that, outwardly, he's an extremely friendly and laid-back guy with a lovably dumb sense of humor, and while his condition is foreshadowed often, it's never done in a way that would be obvious to any player except those who already know about it.
  you can't understand how this feels. knowing that one day, without any warning... it's all going to be reset... to be blunt... it makes it kind of hard to give it my all.
  • Downplayed with Toriel. Right when you first meet her, she does all she can to protect you, guide you through the puzzles, and even has a room ready for you when you get home while also preparing your education. Trying to leave has her grow angry and she tests your determination and strength by fighting you. The reason she acts this way is due to six other children that had fallen down into the underground before the start of the game and each one tried to leave, only to die later on to Asgore's guards, Asgore himself, or just died in an accident. Toriel had to watch each child march off to their doom and she refuses to let the player character suffer the same fate because she also feels like she failed in protecting the children that died and doesn't want to see one more child die. How you end the fight determines how she feels about you and whether or not she can cast off the madness she had to suffer. If you spare her, she sees that you are strong enough without needing to fight and she lets you go. If you kill her, she uses her last breath to tell you to be good and to not let Asgore's plans come to fruition. If you had killed a lot of monsters before the battle with Toriel or you decide to get in a cheap shot when Toriel opens her heart to you, she bursts into an insane laughter over how cruel you are and that you would fit in with the rest of the monsters just fine.
  • Alpyhs looks and acts like a socially awkward nerd that is desperate to have friends, but it isn't until you see her backstory that her current behavior is just tragic. Alpyhs was tasked with finding a way to inject determination into monsters without it killing them and her test subjects were several monsters that were on the brink of death. The end result was the monsters' bodies partially melting and fusing together, creating monstrosities that were barely aware or sentient. When the families of the test subjects demanded an answer on why they haven't heard back from their loved ones in the experiment, Alphys completely breaks down and is unable to tell the truth because she couldn't bear to see the reactions of the families whose lives she screwed up. She keeps the failed experiments in the basement of her laboratory and spends her nights at the garbage dump because she feels like she is garbage. One of the neutral endings implies that the grief she suffered from finally took its toll on her and she commits suicide.
• Prince LaCroix in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines should the PC take the Anarch or Lone Wolf paths: after spending the entire game hunting for the Ankaran Sarcophagus in the hope that there'd be a sleeping Antediluvian inside to steal ultimate power from, he finally opens it, only to find a large supply of C4 — with a timer set to detonate in ten seconds. Very slowly, LaCroix begins to chuckle, which rises to laughter, and finally to utterly hysterical cackling before the entire penthouse suite explodes.
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt there are scholars who have tried to understand what Gaunter O'Dimm really is. In O'Dimm's own words, the ones who did are either dead or have gone entirely mad. The one living researcher that Geralt can find who knows the most about O'Dimm is unhinged and near-suicidal, having spent the last year hiding in a magic circle that's supposed to protect him from O'Dimm. The moment he falls out of the circle, he dies. Geralt can also ask O'Dimm what he is straight to his face, but Gaunter will not tell him, mostly because he still needs Geralt sane and useful.
• The Old Gods' Black Speech in World of Warcraft can invoke madness on those who hear them for prolonged periods. Not just to story character, sometimes to the players as well that need a bit of Percussive Maintenance to snap them out.
  • Unfortunately, this method does not work on Deathwing, formerly known as Neltharion, probably because he's been mad for 10,000 years thanks to the Old Gods, and a knock on the head won't cure that. Back then, he was already crazy enough to tear his body up so badly he needed armored plating bolted into his skin in order to survive.
  • The Twilight Prophet, aka Archbishop Benedictus, leader of the Church of the Holy Light, apparently snapped and joined the Twilight's Hammer after reading a prophecy of the Old Gods' victory.
  • Similarly to Benedictus, Cataclysm also gives us Fandral Staghelm. He was never exactly stable to begin with due to the death of his son and his cold war with Tyrande, but the revelation that Xavius has duped him into causing the bloodshed surrounding Teldrassil proved to be the final straw for his sanity, leading him to becoming The Dragon for Ragnaros.
    Archbishop Benedictus: I looked into the eyes of the dragon... and despaired.
  • Used as a game mechanic when fighting Yogg-Saron (an obvious expy for Lovecraft's Yog-Sothoth) - if you look directly at him for too long at a time while fighting, your "sanity meter" ticks down. Once you are at zero, you have Gone Mad from the Revelation and attack your teammates until they or you are dead.
  • Sargeras the Burning Titan went mad when he discovered that the Void Lords could corrupt the unborn Titan world-souls within planets. His entire omnicidal campaign is an attempt to deprive the Void Lords of any possible foothold in the universe. Azeroth is a priority target because it holds the last world-soul within it.
  • Xal'atath, a dagger containing an entity aligned with the Old Gods, is rumored to have the power to show its wielder visions of the Black Empire which once ruled Azeroth. However everyone shown such a vision is driven insane.
• Albedo from Xenosaga. He was always a high-strung kid, but the cracks begin to show when he finds out that he is immortal, but his (formerly conjoined) twin brother, whom he depends on completely for emotional support is not.
  • I'm practicing so that when they die, I won't cry.
  • On the other hand, it's entirely possible that his worldview would make a hell of a lot of sense if we could grasp what it's like to be immortal.
  • Another part is when he came into direct contact with U-DO. If Albedo didn't go nuts from the aforementioned, this sure as hell did.
  • U-DO period. What happens when a a curious extra-dimensional god-thing is picking your brain for why your species is unknowingly trying to destroy the universe over and over again, and accidentally shows you what the end of all reality looks like ? This trope.

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