10 Most Tragic Characters In Horror Games
The horror genre features some of the most tormented characters in gaming.
Generally, fans don’t come to the horror genre expecting feel-good happy endings or saccharine storylines. Granted, a horrifying, lingering evil is often defeated and the protagonists ultimately triumph, but there’s a lot of bloody terror to be had beforehand.
Tragedy, like cheap jump scares and jarring violins, is an inevitable fact of a lot of horror. Nonetheless, there are some characters in horror games who suffer appalling fates even by the genre’s standards. Kicking off with a redeemed villain-turned-hero from a plot twist M. Night Shyamalan would be proud of to a deceptively-created character FromSoftware wanted us to mistrust, here are some of the most tragic characters in horror video games.
HEAVY SPOILERS FOLLOW.
10. The Prophet - Darkest Dungeon
It’s difficult not to find yourself appreciating the vibe of Darkest Dungeon’s narrator, with his constant melodramatic voice lines delivered to perfection by Wayne June. It’s equally true, however, that the game’s intro cutscene alone makes it clear that he’s done terrible, terrible things.
The Narrator could not keep these horrors secret. One of the game’s recurring bosses, the Sonorous/Fulminating/Gibbering Prophet (depending on the difficulty level of the mission), is a man who the Narrator describes as a “filthy, toothless miscreant” who “boasted an uncanny knowledge of my ambitions and prognosticated publicly that, left unchecked, I would soon unleash doom upon the world".
This Prophet seemingly foresaw his true ambition to bring the great Lovecraftian evil to bear and tried desperately to rally others to the cause of stopping him. The Narrator tried everything he could to kill The Prophet in turn, but the Prophet mysteriously returned after every murder attempt.
The origins of the Prophet and exactly how much he knew on first appearing are unclear, but his ultimate fate is perhaps the most horrific of all Darkest Dungeon bosses: to be tricked into witnessing the true extent of what lurks in the shadows, whereupon he tore out his own eyeballs and fled into depths of the Ruins. He seems rather unwilling to fight in the conventional sense in his boss battles, but the player pursues and kills him (whether permanently or not is also unclear) as yet another harrowed victim of the Narrator’s machinations.