Moments of violence in games that made you cringe

Recommended Videos

Belaam

New member
Nov 27, 2009
617
0
0
LostGryphon said:
Watching some of these... I can safely say that I am quite averse to body horror. Fantastic.


The 1:45 bit in particular...ugh.

Now I have MK fatalities too. Jesus. Some people there have genuine problems. ._.
Ha! That 1:45 bit was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. The panicked grasping and implication that she knows what just happened is what gets me the most.

The torture scenes in Farcry 3 and GTA V were a little rough, but having agency via controller directions lessened them quite a bit for me. "Spin right controller counter clockwise and press X to torture" pulls back on any immersive elements and makes me more aware that I am playing a game and that no real people are involved. Likewise the fatality graphics and build up from the Mortal Kombat stuff.

Conversely, the Tomb Raider reboot got me good several times because there was no transition from projecting myself on the character and trying to survive to seeing grisly, and often self-aware deaths. Characters realizing they are dead and being terrified in that realization will definitely get me to cringe and look away.
 

Spider RedNight

There are holes in my brain
Oct 8, 2011
821
0
0
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and second that Dead space 2 mention... I had the HARDEST damn time but I managed to succeed on the first go. -shudder-
 

The Wykydtron

"Emotions are very important!"
Sep 23, 2010
5,458
0
0
Another vote for Corpse Party. Especially the rusty scissors plot twisty flashback scene...

I'll add a tentative vote for Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, more of the first game instead of Chiru. Episode 3 is probably the worst, i'm fine with the gruesome murders and all to further the game progression but fucking Eva-Beatrice is damn awful. She goes on a psychotic killing spree just murdering Rosa again and again with increasingly elaborate setpieces. She "drowns" her in a sea of jelly for one, not even drowned she exploded from the "water" pressure before that could happen. Worse still, she turns Rosa into a butterfly so she can fly around and have fun in the middle of a typhoon so said butterfly can't control flight to put it mildly, she ends up hurtling into a spider's web and getting eaten alive. That's the worst one.

Though the Tea Party at the end of Episode 2 has a place well up there, Beatrice makes Rosa eat her own relatives. I'm wondering how much that's simple pleasure in violence for Beatrice vs making Battler get back up and fight through sheer shock tactics.

Also Yandere. All of it. From both the psychological horror aspects to just horrific gore I think Yandere wins the thread by a mile. Don't go for Meiko by the way if you're crazy enough to inflict Yandere upon yourself, I fell for the bait because she's the most normal looking of the three but she's just as fucked up. I stopped and immediately uninstalled when she sews her vagina shut with thread and stabs herself in the stomach with a big kitchen knife during sex because her masochism is off the charts. The CG showing it was brutal. Forget cringe, I felt legit disturbed for the rest of the day. I was having to come to terms that Yandere exists. Why, I mean it was an only a matter of time before someone tapped into the yandere character type but an entire game based around that? Why?
 

The Wykydtron

"Emotions are very important!"
Sep 23, 2010
5,458
0
0
Spider RedNight said:
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and second that Dead space 2 mention... I had the HARDEST damn time but I managed to succeed on the first go. -shudder-
Oh god yeah, funny thing is I did it correctly first time without even trying. I just held down the stick and as luck would have it it was right on target. I didn't even clock that it was possible to fail, it was just a disturbing eye needle scene. I legit scared the shit out of myself when my second playthrough didn't go so well...
 

sanquin

New member
Jun 8, 2011
1,837
0
0
Quake 4. There's a part where, in first person, while the character is fully awake, he gets HUGE NEEDLES stabbed into him, has his legs chopped off and replaces with bionics, and other such things. In other words, you get a first person view of a guy being turned into a half-man, half-cyborg...while fully awake.
 

laggyteabag

Scrolling through forums, instead of playing games
Legacy
Oct 25, 2009
3,385
1,090
118
UK
Gender
He/Him
<spoiler=BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea Part 2>That scene near the end of the game in which Atlas is torturing Elizabeth by giving her a transorbital lobotomy in first person. I wear headphones when playing games, and hearing that in 7.1 surround sound almost killed me.
 

SoreWristed

New member
Dec 26, 2014
233
0
0
God of War 3, While the series has always featured extreme violence, it's almost always against either demons, or helpless mortals who seem to poof into a little shower of blood when your blades so much as comes near them. This one made me cringe a little though.
When you are forced to escort the poseidon princess to a mechanism that slowly lowers a gate after opening it. You never see her get actually crushed, but you can go back and see her legs stick out of the mechanism. It also seemed so senseless, since on route to the mechanism you find a box that would easily fulfill the role better if you pushed that into the mechanism. https://youtu.be/Hfsk3QDK--Q?t=10m30s

Tomb raider, It can happen in a couple of places in the game, but whenever this specific death animation played I cringed.
https://youtu.be/NklE7KPaURg?t=2m20s Lara getting her head impaled on a spike

Sniper Elite 3
Youtube is full of videos of these now and the game seems to have turned into a simulator for this specific type of kill. But I was unaware of this possibility and I felt physical pain when I saw it for the first time. In slow-motion even.
https://youtu.be/L8g_7YiPjns Like seeing two grapes being squished by a hammer
 

WonkyWarmaiden

New member
Jun 15, 2010
189
0
0
I'm not too good at handling scenes where characters lose limbs so I actually had to close my eyes near the end season one of The Walking Dead game when a certain character's arm is sawed off. The sounds were bad enough.
 

Lufia Erim

New member
Mar 13, 2015
1,420
0
0
Snydeclyde said:
The torture mission in GTAV was by far the most cringeworthy thing for me, especially the pipewrench to the knees
Was it cringe worthy because it was torture? Or because the guy totally didn't deserve it?

OT: honestly? None. Videogame ( and cartoon/anime) violence has absolutely no effect one me. However, in a book/movie i can't stand it. For some reason though, rape/forced prostitution doesn't bother me either no matter the medium.
 

Glaice

New member
Mar 18, 2013
577
0
0
Outlast: Whistleblower

Whoever saw the "I will make you my wife" psycho later in the game, you would know. Enough said.
 

remnant_phoenix

New member
Apr 4, 2011
1,439
0
0
It's already been mentioned a few times, but the new Tomb Raider did that to me.

The impaling scenes were the worst. The two that stand out most are the earlier one where Lara isn't killed but is punctured in her side and during the rushing water scenes if you mess up...wooden stake right through...(shudder).

For the record, I like the game a lot. The violence, while a bit too graphic for my usual tastes, actually drew me in more and made me feel the grit and the gravity of the situation. It made the story resonate deeper.
 

Islandbuffilo

New member
Apr 16, 2011
152
0
0
Are we talkin' graphic blunt sharp object violence only? If so I've got nothing, however if a bit more magical acts of violence are allowed
The level 5 Thaumaturgy spell in VTMB: Bloodboil,
its pretty gruesome to see people swell up violently like that and then pop like a balloon.
 

RJ 17

The Sound of Silence
Nov 27, 2011
8,687
0
0
My favorite has to be from Arkham City. When you play that game, you always have to make sure you save one of the Special Moves for the very last guy...specifically the instant-takedown. Doing so ensures that the game zooms in and goes into super slow-motion as Batman executes a move that immediately removes the target from the fight.

Arms snapped in half, legs ripped out of sockets...it's brutal!
 

Darth Rosenberg

New member
Oct 25, 2011
1,288
0
0
I loved the new Tomb Raider, but I did end up looking away from various death scenes after a while (oddly I didn't see most of the really nasty deaths till my second playthrough). Lara dying brutally is more or less a staple of the series, but with the more realistic aesthetic I hope they tone it down for the next one.

Aside from that? I don't tend to play gruesomely violent games, so there's not a lot to pick from.

The Walking Dead S1 had a few horrific moments, but that was more context than simple blood'n'violence.
 

Burgers2013

New member
Nov 3, 2013
68
0
0
There were a few moments in the Last of Us and The Walking Dead games that felt really brutal. But, I'd have to say that the only time I was really affected by violence was the first Manhunt. Smothering guys to death with a plastic bag made me sick to my stomach. The graphics weren't very good, so I chalk it up to the sound and maybe just the idea. I didn't play that game for long. In most games, I either don't care or it's so over the top that it's cringe-worthy yet entertaining at the same time (Prototype did a great job with that). Manhunt did not hit that note for me. That's the only game I've ever stopped playing because the content made me feel ill.
 

Zeraki

WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOOOOOOOOR!?
Legacy
Feb 9, 2009
1,615
45
53
New Jersey
Country
United States
Gender
Male
The first Manhunt, I never abandoned a game so quickly in my life. I was a teenager when it came out, so the idea of that game sounded awesome. I mean I loved Grand Theft Auto 3 so I thought it would be good fun. I got up to the part where I had to asphyxiate someone with a plastic back and then stopped. It crossed a line into "too far" territory for me and I never touched the game again.
 

EscapeGoat_v1legacy

New member
Aug 20, 2008
2,788
0
0
I think the ones I thought of straight away have all already been mentioned but sod it, I'll mention them again because ugh, they just make me shudder.

Firstly, God of War 3:

While the game has a lot of grim stuff in it, most of it is just kind of cartoonishly violent. I thought the bit where Helios gets his head ripped off and you see the skin tearing in slow motion is pretty... blegh, but the real one that gets me is when Cronos has his fingernail torn off. Just... christ that gets me every time.

Next, Tomb Raider:

Yeah, the death animation whenever Lara gets impaled on a spike through the throat and you see her desperately and futilely grasping and clawing until she falls limp.

Also, Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea Part 2:

The lobotomy. From a first-person perspective! Ohgodwhy. That was truly one of the most harrowing things I've sat through in a game.

Next, Star War: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

The bit where Kreia quite literally get the force beaten out of her by Darth Sion. It's just one big scene of a big burly zombie man just wailing on an old woman with crunchy visceral sound effects. Not as outright gruesome as the others I've mentioned but it's still really horrible to me.

Finally, the big and pretty obvious one, Spec Ops: The Line:

Yeah, the white phosphorous scene. Yeah, the bit just after where you find the burned civilians. Yeah, the bit where you fight while in the middle of the white phosphorous smoke and you start hallucinating. Yeah, it's all grim. It didn't make me wince in the same way as any of the others, but it still hit home hard.