10 Video Game Characters Who Got Undeservedly Brutal Deaths

As video games have become more and more technically demanding, they have continued to find new ways to be emotionally affecting. Back in the day, seeing the Asteroids ship collapse into tiny pieces was a little sad, but it wasn’t quite a detailed, visceral experience.

Over the years, titles like Dead Space has shown us the harrowing effects of ship damage in deep space and the lives taken in brutal ways. This isn’t a strictly sci-fi phenomenon, either: characters meet grisly ends in all kinds of ways in contemporary gaming, and with sophisticated narratives and characterization, some of these losses can really sting.

Naturally, a lot of the time, we’re dealing this death ourselves, in gory shooters, Mature-rated fighters like Mortal Kombat and such titles. Here, there’s some justification for this, as enemies and villains are dispensed with glee.

We may flinch at some of the more visceral deaths, but when developers inflict them on innocent characters rather than dastardly foes who ‘deserved’ them, that’s a different matter entirely. Here are some examples of characters who received shocking, vicious death scenes they certainly didn’t deserve.

GameCube exclusive cult classic Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is a grim tale indeed. The plot centres around Alex Roivas, a young woman who unknowingly picks up the torch her family has carried for generations: saving humanity from the threat of the Ancients.

To do so, she travels between the chapters of the Tome of Eternal Darkness, each time taking the role of a different person from throughout history who has their own role to play. The protagonist of the first chapter is Pious Augustus, a Roman Centurion who happens upon the Forbidden City and the Ancients’ artifacts. As Pious, the player must select one, and Pious is immediately killed by its power as he touches it.

He doesn’t only die, though. As the game demonstrates in awful, protracted detail, he becomes a powerful Lich, doing his chosen Ancients’ bidding and opposing the player (killing several other protagonists in various ghastly circumstances) for the rest of the adventure. It's a terrible, centuries-long un-end for this noble warrior.