10 Video Game Fates Worse Than Death
4. Bugs Inside The Body (Resistance)
The Resistance series is set in an alternate-history Earth, where an alien race known as the Chimera has infected millions and millions of people on a global scale, mutating them into an assorted range of Chimeran hybrids.
And for a process that transforms humans into slimy alien monsters, the infection period itself is appropriately horrible.
It starts with a swarm of insects called Crawlers entering the body through its airways, allowing them to distribute the virus throughout the host's bloodstream. Once the job is done, the victim is sent into a comatose state, but the scariest thing about this is that the human still remains conscious while the Crawlers are infecting them.
A collectible intel document in Resistance: Fall Of Man - the original game - describes how victims "compulsively try to tear the creatures out of themselves", which causes "self-inflicted bruises and lacerations". People can feel the Crawlers moving around inside them, which leads to them scratching and clawing at their own flesh, in a desperate attempt to pull the bugs out of their body. Yeesh.
We'd sooner take a bullet to the head than endure any of that. Heck, Fall Of Man even has a level titled "Fates Worse than Death." It's not wrong.