And I Must Scream / Video Games

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And I Must Scream in Video Games.

The following has its own page:

• The DCU

• 3D Monster Maze: The first 3D game ever made. After dying, the game tells you you were sentenced to roam the maze forever. You do have the option to appeal in attempt to get out, which basically ends the game.
• The 7th Guest: The spirits of the children who died from The Plague were sealed in dolls. Also, Elinor Knox ends up being turned into a mannequin.
• In Abiotic Factor, anyone caught by the extradimensional Reaper is subject to this fate, ending up with their soul stuck in the Night Realm as a voiceless shadow that is unable to ever leave. Even someone who narrowly escapes the Reaper can have part of their soul forever stuck there.
• In the standard ending of the Interactive Fiction game The Act Of Misdirection, you end up as a sentient bust in a hat store. You are in this state for a few turns before the game ends with the implication that you will be like that forever. In these few turns you can try several actions including "shout" and "move" and the game will disturbingly remark on your inability to do them.
• Afterlife (1996) has a few punishments like this, specially Lust's Screaming Subspace Voids, where the damned are put in a straitjacket, blindfolded, have their ears plugged, and are suspended by a cable in a black void with no sides to touch. Description states insanity comes real quick. There's also what the Powers That Be did to Scegf0d the Ungrateful Angel/Demon, who never felt Heaven and its pleasures to be good enough, nor Hell to be painful and awful enough and was quite incessantly vocal about it: Remove all feeling from the equation and reincarnate him into an utterly unfeeling rock, a being of pure intellect that will go on through eons to feel nothing but his own increasing dementia.
• Captain Pregtz from Alone in the Dark was turned into a tree and has lived in an underground city for 300 years.
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent:
  • Cornelius Agrippa's fate is to be left chained to a wall in a distant cellar, in a decayed, immortal body, aware but unable to move, for 300 years. Although he can speak, he has no one to speak to until you arrive. Given his predicament, he seems in remarkably good spirits when he meets you.
  • Depending on the ending, either Alexander or Daniel will meet this fate, trapped in eternal darkness after being swallowed by the Shadow of the Orb forever.
• Anatomy has a rather sad example: a Sapient House is left to rot alone, and the events of the game itself were only imaginary to keep itself company as it starves indefinitely. What is worse is that the Tagline for the game, "Every house is haunted", implies that every house may share this fate.
• Anchorhead: One of the endings involves the protagonist being trapped in a dimension filled with nothing but "the necrotic folds of the womb of Nehilim".
• It's heavily implied that the in-universe developer of Andy's Apple Farm, Thomas Eastwood, was trapped within the game's code by the same entity that has been haunting his family since 1981. It's also implied that he might be possessing Andy.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura has several cases of this.
  • The most obvious example are the Gray Legionnaires, an army of (very high-quality) undead raised by order of necromancers. They retain their appearance, intelligence, memories and personality and do not die of natural cases, but without magical support, they will slowly rot alive. While as much as the skeleton remains, they can be rejuvenated or killed, but once their bones turn to dust, nothing can free them from this state. According to the very last lucky survivor, they will live forever, immobile, voiceless and senseless, but still conscious.
  • In the very first location, you encounter the spirit of a thug, cursed to be trapped in his dead body forever, in constant pain. However, you can can at least resurrect him, but after his (very soon, as his first action is to attack you) death he still will be trapped in this plane of existence.
  • In the Void, a weird place where the only way to die is by violence, Arronax was defeated by Big Bad Kerghan and imprisoned for 2000 years in some kind of force field just wide enough for him to stand, speaking only occasionally with Kerghan. However, not only did it not affect Arronax's sanity, but, as he states, actually gave him time to think about his life and deeds, eventually leading to his Heel–Face Turn. Interestingly, a spiritual snake-like creature which has been sustaining Arronax's magical prison suffered almost the same fate, being summoned from the other world and forced to roam the same room for all 2000 years, apparently able to communicate only with the owner of the control medallion (which was given to the undead). If you get the medallion in possession, it will say that this place hurts it, and plead for release.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • Assassin's Creed: Revelations: Subject 16 has been stuck inside the Animus thanks to uploading his mind into it. While he seems more composed than he was before he died, he also makes clear he'd really like to get out. It's just that there's nowhere for him to get out to.
  • Assassin's Creed III: Juno has been stuck bodiless in the Grand Temple since the Toba Catastrophe, for about seventy-five thousand years, stewing in her hatred for humanity and unable to talk to anyone except on rare occasions. She turns out to have manipulated history, so the choice is to let her out or let history just repeat itself.
  • Assassin's Creed: Unity heavily implies that Desmond and Clay's minds are stuck in "The Grey", the Precursors' name for their shared technology network, alongside Juno.
  • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: Loki gets stuck in the Yggdrasil machine thanks to Eivor, his body kept technically alive by the machine while he's stuck in a broken simulation for about a thousand years. He's surprisingly chipper when he comes out of it, though it helps that some of it was All According to Plan.
• Assault on Dark Athena: The Ghost Drones are humans who have had most of their insides ripped out and replaced with machinery and cheap AI so that they can be remote-controlled (no word on whether they retain their original human consciousness, though). Riddick encounters one man in the middle of this horrifying conversion, and obliges his request to be killed. Riddick's charitable like that.
• Azrael's Tear centers around The Holy Grail and the substance it's composed of, grailstone. It heals virtually all injuries, cures pretty much any sickness, generally promotes health, gradually mutates the body of some individuals, turns some minds to madness... Oh, and if you're lucky enough to be killed so thoroughly that the grailstone can't revive you, you get to exist as a ghost, with your spirit trapped near your body for as long as it remains under the grailstone's influence.
• The Baby in Yellow: The apartment is full of small cat figurines that contain the trapped souls of the baby's previous victims. In the Sheep Ending, you share their fate.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Centeol in Baldur's Gate, a minor NPC found in Cloakwood, was once a beautiful sorceress, but has been transformed into a grotesque blobby thing that is unable to move from the centre of its nest, where it is fed and protected by giant spiders.
  • The Imprisonment spell traps its victims in a prison either underground or in a Pocket Dimension, unable to die and usually in suspended animation that leaves them unconscious through it. However, in Baldur's Gate II you meet multiple victims who have been trapped by it and remained conscious throughout the experience, with most of them driven mad as a result.
  • Baldur's Gate III:
    • If the player declines to help Gale while he's stuck in the portal at the start of the game, he's unable to get out on his own and is left to die in a Void Between the Worlds. If playing as The Dark Urge, you can speed up the process by hacking off his hand.
    • In Auntie Ethel's basement, you can find some of her past victims in various states of torment. One notable example is the Gnarled Door, a living door who is only able to communicate through psychic images; which used to be a thief who was caught by Ethel and punished by being forced to guard her lair, trapped alone and immobile in the dank cave for decades. On one occasion, he allowed a party of fighters to enter Ethel's lair, hoping that they would be able to defeat her; when they failed, Ethel declared that for everyone who passes through the door, she would add ten more years to his torment. As such, he really doesn't want you and your teammates to go through him, even though there's nothing he can do on account of the door actually being an illusion.
    • The Nightsong is the Broken Angel daughter of the God of the Moon Selune, who for the past century was trapped in the Dark World by her Evil Aunt the God of Darkness Shar, murdered over and over again by her followers as a rite of passage. Shadowheart's questline has her decide whether to have a Heel–Face Turn and free her, or cross the Moral Event Horizon and put her down for good. If the latter is chosen she's actually relieved to experience "true death, at last".
    • The Sentient Amulet contains the soul of a monk who was cursed with Tasha's Hideous Laughter by Sharrans that persisted even in death. The associated quest revolves around finding his granddaughter in the titular city to lift the curse only to find out that she died of old age a year before the party arrived. If the player doesn't agree to take on the curse for him, he's Barred from the Afterlife and doomed to spend the rest of eternity Laughing Mad within the amulet. Making matters worse, the amulet is very easy to miss.
    • In the illithid hive hidden underneath Moonrise Towers there's a hidden Brain in a Jar belonging to a githzerai Warrior Monk who was captured & harvested by illithids, and was able to stay aware and lucid the entire time thanks to her order's mental training. She begs you to put her out of her misery, and rewards you with a permanent buff to Intelligence saves.
    • There's also the thousands of starving vampires in Arc Villain Cazador's basement. Some of them have been left in agony from their Horror Hunger for two centuries, and the player has the option to resolve the Genocide Dilemma by simply leaving them there to continue suffering indefinitely.
    • Cazador's other victims don't fare much better. Since they are unable to disobey any direct command from him, his thralls are used as sex slaves and forced to sleep with strangers to lure them into Cazador's clutches. He also dishes out brutal punishments to those who fail him.
      Astarion: The bastard sealed me, starving, inside a dusty tomb all on my own for an entire year. Months of scratching my hands raw trying to carve my way out. More months of not moving at all. Months of wishing only for death.
    • If Wyll fails to uphold his Deal with the Devil, he's Dragged Off to Hell and forced to spend the rest of eternity in torment as a barely-sapient Blob Monster.
    • If The Dark Urge fails to rid himself of Bhaal's influence and doesn't Take Over the World for him, according to the Dummied Out "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue he's Dragged Off to Hell and forced to become breeding stock for the next generation of Bhaalspawn. His partner Lord Gortash suffers a similarly awful fate at the hands of his god Bane after his death, as the god of tyranny doesn't look kindly upon his subordinates' failures. The canonical outcome of this last-second Heel–Face Turn, as of Patch 5, isn't much better; as if the Dark Urge chooses to imprison rather then kill themselves after this, Bhaal completely possesses their mind so they're little more than a twitching, convulsing mess that can only think about how much they want to kill their old companions, up to and including their lover. Some dialog choices indicate that there's still a part of them trying to resist the Urge and failing horribly, so all they can do is watch as some other force drives their body to kill those they care about.
    • If the party fails The Sixth Ranger Halsin's questline, he's permanently trapped in the Dark World known as the Shadowfell. They sadly write him off as dead, but in truth it's a Fate Worse than Death as it's possible for the living to survive on the plane but it's a miserable existence as the place actively drains any and all positive emotion.
    • As a child, Enver Gortash's parents sold him to a warlock to escape debt. As revenge, he infected them with a special kind of tadpole that forces their bodies to follow Gortash's will while keeping their minds fully conscious but helpless. They were Abusive Parents, and are now forced to watch their bodies outwardly act like doting parents as their mind curses their child for ending up just as bad as they thought he was. Connecting your mind to theirs will have them express relief that someone can finally hear what they really want to say, and beg you to save them. You can offer to Mercy Kill them, though they would much rather just be freed from this torment.
• In Baten Kaitos, the five islands are kept aloft by pieces of the dead god of evil, Malpercio. In Baten Kaitos Origins, you learn Malpercio was actually five people (Seph, Thoran, Ven, Marno, and Pieda) who sold their soul to the Dark Brethren for power, and it was their bodies that were sealed into the End Magnus. Moreover, a chunk of Marno is inside Sagi, and Marno serves as Sagi's guardian spirit. Have the five of them been conscious while they're entombed in the islands?! Moreover, in Eternal Wings, the five End Magnus get fused together. Are they still conscious after that?
• Poor Jeanne is likely in a situation like this in the first half of Bayonetta 2 after she's grabbed by the demons of the Inferno, given the ending of the "Did You Miss Me?" trailer; a shot can be seen of her soul floating alone and helpless in a void, with Bayonetta's voice assuring her, "Jeanne, I'm on my way. Just behave yourself for a bit longer..." Whether she's conscious or not then isn't known, but assuming she can hear it...
  • Also in the same game, we learn how Rodin creates the special demonic weapons he gives Bayonetta for testing: by sealing the souls of powerful demons inside of said weapons to power them. And the demons within are fully conscious. Just ask Alraune.
• Being One features some disturbing examples.
  • In the first game, you have to disable three stasis tanks to escape the lab you were held in. One of the alien specimens, who is a telepath, says "Help us, help us, help us..." just before dying.
  • The fourth episode has werewolves (or Lycans, as they call them), and the scientists' research explains that being a werewolf actually comes from a virus activated by the moon, and those infected go on a rage-driven rampage in an attempt to kill themselves. But that's tricky when you consider that they heal very fast.
  • The fifth game, revealing how twisted the Big Bad is, has nanobots that can dissolve human flesh and turn brain-dead humans into zombies. The player is injected with these nanos as well, and has to endure incredible pain while trying to find a cure.
• Being returned to the ink in Bendy and the Ink Machine.
  Alice: Do you know what it's like? Living in the dark puddles? It's a buzzing, screaming well of voices! Bits of your mind, swimming ... like ... like fish in a bowl!
• Berry Bury Berry has many props who Can Only Move the Eyes and are humans who were transformed to teach them a lesson. In the "Together" ending, the player joins them by being trapped inside of the piggy bank that appears at the end of each day as a punishment for allegedly being greedy.
• In BioShock, if you shoot the plaster sculptures courtesy of Sander Cohen, they bleed. Of course, even more unsettling is that they sometimes are moved when you are not looking. Oh, and one of them is a little girl. It's the only statue that doesn't bleed.
• BioShock 2:
  • Gilbert Alexander was experimented on by Sophia Lamb — her first test subject for what she plans to do with her daughter. He is reduced to a giant floating tentacled blob, his sanity long since disappeared, howling in the dark at the splicers and calling himself Alex the Great. His last recorded message to you begs you to kill him, to put him out of his misery. In a curious subversion, honoring his wishes and killing him is treated just as bad as killing the innocent little sisters. This only comes about because of a programming oversight they didn't catch until after it was released, namely that the achievement for being a saint involves not killing Alexander at the end, despite the implications of this.
  • When Lamb turns Sinclair into a Big Daddy, he begs with the last ounce of humanity in him for death. The player can use the fully upgraded version of Hypnotize to have Sinclair aid them in killing the Splicers around and to follow them, but every moment not spent whaling on the poor bastard is more time for him to brokenly plead for death.
  • Some of the Big Daddy conversion subjects had their minds left intact. Yikes. In fact, the Big Bad even pities you for this, since you are one of those subjects.
• The Handymen of BioShock Infinite were once sickly or disabled Columbians who were bonded into large mechanical bodies. Their dialogue reveals that they live in a constant state of agony so much that they threaten to make the player feel what they feel.
• Animus from The Black Heart, because of how monstrous he was when born, his mother ordered to have him killed, but, because he's the son of Final, he was unable to die, and he was instead put inside an iron maiden, where he remained alive for about 400 years. No wonder that when he finally came out he became an insane Combat Sadomasochist Death Seeker.
• In Blasphemous, various people have been subjected to various unpleasant fates. Some noteworthy examples:
  • Altasgracias is a creature resulting from three women who did not wish to marry. The Miracle, answering their prayers, fused them together into a three-faced giant bearded woman. One of the faces of Altasgracias has a perpetually worried look and will scream inaudibly from time to time, indicating that she most certainly is not taking her fate well.
  • Ten Piedad was once a nameless man who slept in the arms of a statue, mimicking the Pietà. As he slept, the Miracle turned him into a humanoid creature with limbs like a gnarled tree and the skull of a goat for a head, and the man has no control over his body.
  • Subverted with the Blessed Lord, who was once heralded as a saint in his lifetime, using his salt as if it were blessings to the people of Cvstodia, who fervently believed him and began following him. The Grievous Miracle saw through the feigned holiness of the Blessed Lord and trapped him and his followers in salt as punishment. The Blessed Lord may be aware of his cursed state, but he can break free from it; he simply has to do actual blessings. Once he's blessed the third relic for you, he falls silent. Whether or not the Miracle let him go is unanswered, though the sequel vaguely hints to the former.
  • Downplayed with Gémino, a giant man whose body is riddled with arrows and encased in a metal prison custom fit to his body. As you kill bosses without fulfilling his quest, his body steadily becomes overgrown by the tree that his prison is connected to. Gémino, however, is not too bothered by his fate; he simply asks you to bring him some hot oil so he can feel warmth one more time before the tree consumes him.
• BlazBlue:
  • Arakune was originally a scientist, researching the netherworld of lost souls called the Boundary. As he learned more and more, he eventually fell into the Boundary, and now... he is a shapeless mass of insects, who lives only to pursue knowledge. You see that face-like white plate? That's not his face. He has no face. That's just a mask he stuck onto himself to try and make communicating easier. Also, while he thinks he's talking perfectly normal, his speech comes out fragmented and incomprehensible, a lot like this actually. When his former love interest, who is trying to save him, finally tracks him down, he is able to remember her, and speak clearly for the first time in years, and tries to warn her that she is dangerously close to becoming like him... and while he tried to stop her from pursuing him further to avoid getting even closer, she also realizes that just running away at that point would pretty much doom her to the fate... Subverted as of BlazBlue: Chronophantasma, where Arakune has regained full control over his speech. At this point, however, Litchi is now forced into an Unwitting Pawn to Imperator Saya, and continues to pursue Arakune in hopes of a cure... which can also be used at her due to avoid the doom as mentioned above... She has abandoned Kokonoe because while the latter is capable of the cure, she just plain refused to make one, preferring to concentrate on her lust of vengeance against Terumi (in fact Litchi asked her first, Kokonoe just refused). Oh and you may be wondering WHO is capable of at least giving Arakune coherency in speech. Why, it's our resident evil Mad Scientist Relius Clover, of course. This is Relius we're talking about, so you may say that the process of giving speech coherency to Arakune can be this trope altogether too.
  • BlazBlue: Continuum Shift:
    • Lambda-11's story mode both plays this straight and combines it with Mind Rape. The former when she is the subject of durability tests with high voltage (which the researchers note would fry most Murakumo units), but is only partially online so she cannot voice her agony or requests for help. Later, Kokonoe acquires her and wipes her mind so she can be used as a combat drone. Lambda hears Kokonoe talking about mind-wiping her and panics, but again is not able to speak. Even her supposed "gag reel" has these elements present, making it more soul-crushingly depressing than funny.
    • In Makoto's bad ending, Relius Clover gets a hold of her and, in a rather harrowing sequence, tortures her via prolonged Mind Rape. Relius' last comment implies that he intends to transform her into something like his wife-turned-battle-doll Ignis, and Makoto is still conscious and aware as the ending fades to black. Yikes. Fortunately, it's a bad ending so it's not Canon.
• Bleak Haven: According to Emily (who infiltrated Malak's Cult by pretending to be one of their worshippers), the victims converted into humanoid monstrosities Frankensteined together from dissected parts are still alive, and well aware of their surroundings.
  They don't let people die. Not really. They remove pieces. Limbs. Flesh. Eyes. But they don't let you bleed out. They believe if you die during the process, you aren't worthy.
• Bloodborne:
  • The Vileblood spirit killed by the Executioners lie inside the weapons of the Executioners and utilised as weapons, and the vengeful spirits grind by the wagon wheel and drenched into the gloves and are implied to be conscious. If you give a letter to Alfred to spoil the location of Cainhurst, Alfred would head to the throne room to grind Annalise, the immortal queen of Vileblood, into mincemeat with his wagon wheel. It is implied those blobs of flesh are still alive after having been ground into pieces.
  • There's also Gehrman, the first Hunter, who has been stuck in the Hunter's Dream for what's implied to be hundreds of iterations of the Night of the Hunt. Trapped between his own nigh-immortality, an unwillingness to die, as him doing so would mean that a new Hunter would have to take his place, as well as a Deal with the Devil, he's forced to continue doing what he loved the most, in the place he loved the most, for the rest of eternity, forever surrounded by reminders of his own past failures and sins. And to make matters worse, not even sleep is a reprieve to him, as it's implied that Gehrman is tortured by the Hunter's Nightmare whenever he gets a shut eye... Tragically, this may very well make the Final Boss fight against him one between two people who are just desperately trying to Mercy Kill each other.
• During Bravely Default's false ending, Airy threatens your party with this after you enter the final dungeon: even though it will take five millennia for the destroyed crystal to regenerate, they will have your screams of torment to help pass the time.
• Cavern of Dreams: The Frozen King wanted immortality. He got it when the Boxed Nightmare froze him and his entire court in time for eternity.
• Chained Echoes has white flowers that scream when stepped on. They're typically not this trope, but the ones outside of the White Rose Inn have had human souls bound to them by the innkeeper, dooming them to an eternity of immobility unless they are killed by external sources. Later, you find that Lady Reina has also been subjected to the same thing, having her soul bound to a white flower in her tomb where she must repeat the password to open the realm of the Vaen for thousands of years.
• Chrono Trigger: In the Fiendlord's Keep/Magus's Lair, you encounter Decedents, skeletons with spears you've fought before in several varieties. However, this area makes it clear their existence is torment. One group outright begs you to destroy them so they can be free from the spell, and right before that you encounter a group trying to kill each other over and over (which the Omnicrone standing over them notes can't work, as they're already dead).
• Chzo Mythos:
  • Trilby gets this treatment in 6 Days A Sacrifice, where he or one of his clones is absorbed into Chzo's body to suffer for eternity beyond casual interpretations of space and time.
  • Cabadath, an ancient druid who summoned but failed to control Chzo ages ago. Chzo joined his soul to a tree, essentially granting him immortality and allowing him to manifest himself as The Prince to whoever disturbs the wood of the tree.
• Aaron from Clive Barker's Undying was chained up in a dungeon and eaten alive by rats, with his jaw removed so he couldn't scream.
• The premise of Clone Drone in the Danger Zone is alien robots putting human minds inside robotic bodies for the sole purpose of gladitorial combat against other robots (and sometimes other humans). These bodies can feel all the pain of being chopped or smashed into pieces, their severed heads can survive for hours on backup power, and they aren't capable of speech.
• In The ClueFinders Reading Adventures Ages 9–12: Mystery of the Missing Amulet, Malicia is trapped inside the amulet at the end when Owen reflects its blast on her. She deserved it.
• Yuri's fate in the Allied ending of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, where he is captured, strapped down to what amounts to a metallic coffin, with something like a Dentist's lamp right over his head, and kept there for a life sentence, all to prevent him from using his Psychic powers.
• Control (2019): After Power Incontinence leads to him losing control of his pyrotechnic powers, Director Northmoor is semi-voluntarily confined to the sarcophagus at the core of the Oldest House's power plant, unable to leave as his heat is used to generate electricity.
• Those who die in the school in Corpse Party are left to wander the school feeling the pain they felt when they died for eternity.
• In Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, this is the unfortunate and gruesomely nightmarish fate of N. Brio as revealed in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue of the game, as he (still trapped in his pterodactyl form) gets mistaken for a flying squirrel and captured by a Mad Doctor, who then proceeds to taxidermize N. Brio alive and put him on display into his exhibit for the visitors to see, all while N. Brio is fully conscious of what's happening to him as he can only watch in horror while silently begging for help, but is completely unable to escape and worse, speak with anybody about his horrifyingly agonizing situation. Just as if the whole ordeal wasn't already bad enough, it's revealed the professor who did all of this was none other than Ripper Roo, meaning that N. Brio got done in by his own creation! While it's fitting considering everything he's done, that's just a terrifying way to go...
• In Crystal's Pony Tale, a witch kidnaps and imprisons Crystal's friends. The placements are random so one of them could be encased in a cave wall and another could be rendered to a simple outline on a carousel.
• In Darkest Dungeon, this is the fate of those taken by the Collector, who collects the severed heads and souls of fallen heroes (namely a Highwayman, a Man-at-arms, and a Vestal) and uses their power during combat. How aware they are is left up in the air.
• Dark Souls: The eventual and inevitable fate of all those cursed with the Darkbrand. As for more specific examples:
  • The Bed of Chaos is the Witch of Izalith. She tried to use her Lord Soul to recreate the First Flame, but it went horribly wrong. The Witch and 2 of her daughters were trapped in the chaotic flame, which also created all of Lordran's Demons. Its implied she and her two daughters are still vaguely conscious. Dark Souls II very strongly implies that the Lost Sinner is the Witch who has been reincarnated and has imprisoned herself to further atone for her crimes.
  • It turns out that when Gwyn set out to rekindle the First Flame, he had to light himself on fire in the Kiln to keep the flame going. By the time you find him, he's been burning for a very long time and has gone hollowed and insane. His fight is just him wanting The Last Dance before you finally give him a Mercy Kill. In Dark Souls III, he is revived inside the Soul of Cinder, a physical form of every soul who kept the First Flame lit. Judging by some of Ludleth's lines, all of those souls are in constant agony, burning forever within the heart of the First Flame, yet forced to fight in its defense when someone might be there to snuff it out.
  • It's implied that the bodies making up Gravelord Nito are still conscious. Same with The Rotten in II, which is a reincarnation of Nito.
• The survivors of Dead by Daylight are trapped in the Entity's dimension, who subjects them to a "Groundhog Day" Loop of being chased by murderers over and over again. Regardless of whether they live or die from an encounter, they will always reappear for the next cat and mouse game.
• Dead Island gives us Suicider zombies, a type of zombie that explodes on proximity to survivors. They still retain their minds, however, they are driven by a primal urge to explode near uninfected survivors. They can sometimes be heard saying "Help me" before exploding.
• Deltarune: Within the game files are lines of dialogue which are never used at any point in the game proper, and seem to pertain to... someone... who's trapped in a Void Between the Worlds. They can't see anything, have no idea how much time is passing, don't remember how they got here, and aren't sure if they're really even alive, but they can't seem to die either way. Their only faint comfort is a scratching sound they can sometimes hear coming from off in the darkness, giving them a glimmer of hope that someone can hear them calling for help.
• Late in the Survival Horror/Guro game Demonophobia, it's revealed by Ritz that the game's respawn system is not simply a gameplay mechanic — it actually happens. Worse, every time main character Sakuri dies she remains conscious, aware, and feeling the pain of the fatal injury for three days before she's resurrected and her memory of the event is erased. All of those corpses you've passed along your way are going through the exact same torture, but unlike Sakuri they don't have a guardian spirit to resurrect them and end their pain; they're going to be in that state for eternity.
• Destiny/Destiny 2:
  • Inverted in the form of the Taken, who are enemies created from every enemy race in the game. While their writhing and painful shrieks give off the impression that they're suffering, reading the lore actually reveals that they're actually in constant ecstasy; when a creature becomes a Taken, all of their fears and doubts are taken away as the Darkness bestows them with joy, and unified purpose — that being the destruction of the Light. When you think about it, such could still be seen as a Fate Worse than Death in a different way. As of Forsaken, it's revealed that being Taken is actually this trope played STRAIGHT; when you free the Awoken Techeuns in their respective boss fights, it's revealed that, not only were they actually aware of what had become of them, but being Taken actually is as torturous as it appears.
  • The end of Forsaken, carried out in the "Last Wish" raid, sees the Dreaming City cursed by Riven, the last Ahamkara. As per her bargain with Savathun, Riven superimposed a 3-week long simulation of events in the Dreaming City, recorded by Quria, Blade Transform, onto the Awoken stronghold. The simulation sees Savathun's daughter, Dul Incaru, attempting to reach the Distributary, the Awoken's true birthplace, only to be stopped by Guardians. Every time Dul Incaru is defeated, the simulation, and thus the events, are repeated. Everyone in the Dreaming City at the time of these events is not only bound to them, but also consciously aware of how things keep on repeating. One notable example is a Corsair dying in a ship crash, helpless to alter events despite knowing they’re walking to their death. The only way to break the loop would be to allow Dul Incaru to succeed in her mission, but doing so would pretty much spell the end of the Sol System. "Season of the Wish" makes the situation even darker, revealing that the curse on the Dreaming City is irreversible. While Mara vows to find a way to free her people, until she does, they'll be trapped forever.
  • The Witness's ultimate aim, the "final shape", is this. Using the infinite Light within the Traveler to reshape reality, it would imprison every living being in the universe in what it believes to be their assigned best points in existence. In practice, it takes the form of transforming every living being into calcified statues. The opening cutscene showcases this for a brief moment in the Last City, only for it to wear off when the Traveler resists. As shown by the reactions of the people, they were all awake — and aware — as the Witness stuck them into a frozen eternity.
  • The veiled statues from the Pyramids are revealed to also be an example of this. As it turns out, each statue is a soul from the Witness itself. Within the Witness, some of the minds that make up its being realized that what they’re doing is wrong, and began to rise up in dissent. To quell this internal rebellion, the Witness discarded and sealed these souls away, creating the veiled statues. They’re fully conscious and aware while trapped, and while they can scream, they can only be heard by beings capable of harnessing Darkness. As they divulge in The Final Shape, there's lots more voices like them still inside of the Witness, all equally bound and screaming just like them.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution has the Hyron Project Drones, a quantum supercomputer with human "drones" connected directly into it that allow it not only to process and store enormous amounts of data, but also to think abstractly and even be somewhat self-aware. The drones are kidnapped young women from all over the world who undergo extensive and brutal medical testing to determine if they are even suited as drones. Only a small percentage of them are, meaning the rest are either terminated or used for other unethical experiments. Those who prove suitable have their spine and parts of their brain replaced by cyberware, a procedure only a small number of them survive. Those few who could be successfully turned into drones are fitted with cooling suits and connected to the computer until their eventual death, causing strange and creepy lines lines of sentences to appear at the end of messages sent by the computer, often about feeling cold. Also, these drones usually only last a few months, rarely more than a year, which in turn requires a constant supply of hundreds and thousands of new victims.
• Diablo:
  • See, there are these things called soulstones, used to imprison the spirits of the main Big Bads of the game. But one of them, Baal, managed to shatter his. The biggest shard left wasn't powerful enough to hold him. A very powerful mage named Tal Rasha selflessly offers his powers to contain the demon in the soulstone. Guess what this entails? They strap his body to a giant stone tablet in an ancient tomb in the middle of a desert, shove the stone into his chest, and leave him to eternally battle a demon for his mind! About halfway through the second game, the main evil party releases Baal from his body, with the side effect of killing Tal Rasha.
  • In another example, an immortal angel made a stupid move to attack one of the main villains when not thoroughly prepared. Proceed to angel being captured by a pissed off Big Bad. They slowly ripped off his wings, and then put huge barbed hooks through his skin and stretched it out. After that, they trapped him in a chamber of mirrors, with his eyelids torn off. So that the only thing he can see for all eternity is his torn, bloated figure.
  • In Diablo IV, a thief killed by the Dregs swallowed a necromantic relic in hopes it would save his life. Instead, his soul was trapped in his dead body, able to feel the pain of its wounds and decay but unable to do anything except speak. Worse, his body was tossed in a mass grave and all of the other victims were trapped by the relic.
• In Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, one case revolves around an organ trafficking ring selling gilded cages to men in cyberspace with virtual girls waiting on them hand & foot while their real bodies are kidnapped and harvested. One man attempts to defy their instructions to never leave and log out, only to be informed that there's nowhere to log out to. Thankfully the heroes Set Right What Once Went Wrong in the end, preventing him from having received this terrible fate in the first place.
• Happens to the Big Bad in Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice: after defeating the would-be "hero", Mao decides against killing him and concludes that his immortal body would make him a perfect lab rat for his experiments... old school Mad Scientist type-experiments that usually involve rusty needles and a complete lack of anesthesia. For thousands of years. As of the sequel, he has apparently been re-purposed as the power source for Mao's Humongous Mecha — and yes, he's still alive.
• Dishonored:
  • The Heart helps you find collectibles and upgrade runes while giving you information on Dunwall and people (should you be pointing it at them). Once in a while, however, you hear it say "What have they done TO ME!?" or comment on its past life.
    The Outsider: Here, take this heart. Made from a living thing.
  • The culmination of the Daud DLC also has this as a result of using the nonlethal takedown on the Final Boss: you can replace the portrait of Emily Delilah is using in her ritual with a painting of a tree. Once in, Delilah will have no way to leave that form. And since the tree is implied to be in the void, she can't even rely on being chopped down to end her torment... This gets inverted in Dishonored 2, as the non-lethal way to bring down Delilah is to corrupt her ritual spell so that she ends up trapped in her "perfect world" where she thinks everyone is worshipping her.
• In Divinity: Original Sin II, it's shown the long-dead Evil Overlord Braccus Rex was quite fond of these, and more than one quest involves helping victims of his curses thousands of years after his passing:
  • Sir Withermoore fought Rex a thousand years ago, resulting in him being pinned to a wall with his spear and his soul trapped in a jar while his body remained conscious the entire time.
  • The Flaming Pigs were a group of dissidents cursed by Rex, living in perpetual torment unless the player either butchers them or uses the Bless spell.
• The Revenants, at least in Doom (2016), became this in the new timeline. The shrieking, gore-splattered skeletons with rockets attached? They were once human. Humans who were subjected to weeks-long torture on end, then injected with Lazarus Waves until they perish, with Hell's energy causing their body to reanimate.
• Dota 2 has no less than two cases of this happening in one character's backstory. N'aix the Lifestealer was once a normal thief, who was punished by being made immortal and chained up in a dungeon where he was tortured until his mind broke. Later, a wizard who was sentenced to a similar punishment tried to escape the dungeon by using his magic to perform Grand Theft Me on N'aix and have him distract the guards, but N'aix's madness formed a powerful vortex that sucked in the wizard's consciousness. As a result, both their minds were merged into one, with N'aix's consciousness retaining control of his body while the wizard was left helpless, only capable of whispering faint suggestions into the Lifestealer's mind.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • Shale has been deactivated, but nevertheless capable of thought, for 30 years in the middle of some little peasant village. As a result of this, Shale has a deep and very vocalized loathing of pigeons and the various peasants the deactivated Golem was forced to stand still and watch for 30 years. Shale also mentions having been stuck and deactivated in the deep roads in the complete dark for a few CENTURIES. At least there weren't any pigeons down there.
    • The Sylvans of the Brecilian Forest are the disastrous results of a Fade spirit possessing a tree; deprived of sight and voice, most of them have reverted to slaughtering travellers in fits of insane jealousy.
    • The Ancient Elven Arcane Warrior frozen in the phylactery for centuries in the Elven Ruins of the Brecilian Forest. When the player character finds him/her, he/she is practically insane except for the knowledge of the Arcane Warrior. You have the choice to free him/her or forever trap him/her in the state he/she is in.
    • There are three examples of people turned into statues by Tevinter magisters, one found in the basement of the Circle Tower during the Mage origin, and two more found in the Wending Woods during Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening. The first one doesn't seem to be bothered, as apparently the process of being turned to stone also removed her emotions, and one of the statues in the Wending Woods has managed to "sleep" for centuries. However, the second statue was unable to sleep due to anger, and has been conscious the whole time.
  • Dragon Age II:
    • Xenon the Black Emporium merchant was granted eternal life, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. After 400 years... yeah.
    • Anders describes to Merrill that becoming an abomination sees you trapped inside your own body and fighting to resist the demon's actions, but having no choice but to watch in horror as the demon carries out its heinous acts.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest V has a sequence in which the protagonist and his wife are turned into self-aware statues for the better part of a decade (primarily as an excuse for a Plot-Relevant Age-Up for the protagonist's children). It is explicitly stated that they were aware of everything that was occurring during that time.
  • Dragon Quest VI: Spiegel kept a princess trapped in a mirror for undetermined millennia to force her to love him. She could appear in one mirror of Castle Swanstone but she was unable to communicate with anybody.
  • In Dragon Quest VIII, the townspeople of Trodain are immobilized via magical vines by Dhoulmagus. It's clear to see that judging by the expressions on their faces that they are completely aware of what's going on... they get better when the curse is broken after defeating Rhapthorne, natch. Also, according to Jessica, anyone being controlled by the staff must feel this way considering they are being controlled by Rhapthorne.
• In Duck Season, this happens to the player in the "Stuck Forever" ending. If the player fails to stop the dog from attacking the television screen in the showdown, the dog will go through it and trap the player in the game world. The dog steps in front of the screen and leans down to give a wave to the player before shutting the game off, with The Stinger having the screen turning back on and being presented with a new kid.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • Combining magma and water results in obsidian. It's very popular amongst the player base to make traps that encase an invading force (or elves, because nobody likes the elves) in obsidian, then mine and carve said obsidian into statues or even more mundane things. While in-game, the creatures are considered "dead" and the bodies effectively destroyed, the players particularly like to invoke this trope. The things you can occasionally find in "unusual volcanic wall" formations of gems and obsidian show that some things may be entombed without dying this way. Even more fun is to carve the obsidian containing elven merchants into stone crafts, then sell those crafts to the next elven caravan.
  • Vampires don't age and do not need to eat, drink or sleep to stay alive. Thus it is possible to wall them in a room and leave them isolated from the rest of the world forever. It is even advised to do so, since walls are undestructible by enemies for now, and having at least one citizen alive even if it is a vampire prevents you from having a Game Over. Thus if you have a sealed vampire, it is impossible to lose in Fortress Mode, even if the vampire goes insane from being naked. That is, until the ghosts come to pay him a visit...
  • Tarn Adams somewhat reluctantly confirmed this was the case with all Adventure-mode Characters, after a player noticed that "[adventurer]'s tears" sometimes welled in their eyes after doing something horrifying enough. The possessed may not act by themselves in any way, but all the emotional engines are still in place.
    Tarn "Toady One" Adams: The emotional circumstance processor is still turned on, with a randomly rolled up personality, but they can't express themselves or take control... they can only cry.
• Eiyuu:
  • Zelos' fate in the 2nd ending (Read: Bad Ending) is being frozen in an ice cube forever...
  • The Truth, the REAL main antagonist of this game, also counts. It is an immortal being literally trapped in its own world. This is in fact the reason why it adopts Zelos as his minion and wishes for the Mask of Truth needed to free himself... In fact, trying to give him the mask leads to one of your allies confronting you in a Hopeless Boss Fight and freezing you, leading to the worst ending.
• In Elden Ring, the Loathsome Dung Eater is Hated by All for willfully inflicting this on people. He's a Serial Killer infamous for routinely Desecrating the Dead in a manner so vile the souls of his victims are Barred from the Afterlife, simply because he hates everyone. His victims are forced to either remain as tormented wandering souls forever, never able to find peace, or be reborn as the Humanoid Abomination race known as Omens, the latter being exactly what he wants.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Daedra are the et'Ada ("original spirits") who did not participate in the creation of Mundus (the mortal plane) and thus, maintain their full divine power including Complete Immortality. They can manifest in a physical form and are not actually killed if that form is slain, but their spirit is forced back to Oblivion to coalesce, a process which can take hundreds of years and is considered by them to be "torturous and humiliating". Spending a few hundred years in such a state may explain why most Daedra are so keen on destroying that place (Mundus) where so many pesky Daedra-killing heroes come from.
  • Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of Destruction, suffers from this one two levels:
    • As the Daedric Prince of Destruction, Dagon exists to destroy everything, and his Daedric Plane reflects this, being a Lethal Lava Wasteland. However, due to the nature of Oblivion (chaotic and ever-changing) as well as the aforementioned immortality of all the Daedric beings who reside there, he can't actually destroy anything for good.
    • The Obscure Text The Seven Fights of the Aldudagga implies that this was done intentionally to Dagon as a form of Ironic Hell, which he can only escape by accomplishing an Impossible Task, as punishment for interfering in Alduin's (the draconic Beast of the Apocalypse) cyclical destruction of the world.
      Alduin: You I curse right here and right now! I take away your ability to jump and jump and jump and doom you to [the void] where you will not be able to leave except for auspicious days long between one and another and even so only through hard, hard work. And it will be this way, my little corner cutter, until you have destroyed all that in the world which you have stolen from earlier kalpas, which is to say probably never at all!
  • Jyggalag, the Daedric Prince of Order (in contrast to the other chaos-leaning Princes), suffered a similar Ironic Hell version by being forced to become his own antithesis by the other Princes, who feared his growing power. That antithesis took the form of Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness. (The main plot of Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion is all about resolving this situation.)
  • Morrowind has the Corprus Disease, an Eldritch disease channeled from the power of the Heart of a "dead" god by the game's Big Bad, Dagoth Ur. The physical side effects of the disease essentially combine the worst aspects of leprosy, cancer, and dementia, eventually turning sufferers into mindless bloated monsters. On the "plus" side, it makes you immune to all other diseases and turns you into The Ageless. Essentially, your only hope for relief once the disease has advanced is a Mercy Kill. Naturally, the Nerevarine catches the disease and is cured of the negative effects only. Also, naturally, the cure only works on the Nerevarine, killing all others it's tested on.
  • Oblivion:
    • The members of the Mythic Dawn, worshipers of Mehrunes Dagon and followers of Big Bad Mankar Camoran, end up with such a fate when they die. The place they're sent to upon death looks pleasant, but in truth they're on a plane in Oblivion, being killed over and over again by Daedra until Mehrunes Dagon is able to claim victory, at which point they will (supposedly) all be restored.
    • There's also Arkved, the poor, poor wizard who decided it was a good idea to swipe a priceless relic from Vaermina, the Daedric Prince of Dreams and Nightmares. She punished him by trapping him in an eternal nightmare — his tower is warped into a world where he can't tell reality from fiction, is perpetually haunted by horrific beasts, and decides to put himself into a coma and pray for the sweet release of death (which Vaermina ensures will never come). The player can Mercy Kill him, and at that point, it really is a mercy.
    • The wielders of the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal suffer a truly horrible fate. Nocturnal is the Daedric Prince of Thieves and Shadows, and when her precious Cowl was stolen, she powerfully hexed it — anyone who wears it has their true identity erased from history. Essentially, they become "socially invisible", and no one can remember them except by the cowl itself; if they're wearing it, they're the Grey Fox (this is the secret to the Grey Fox's seeming immortality; the Fox is a Legacy Character, but while the cowl is on nobody can tell any of the Foxes apart no matter how different they look or act), if not, they're a stranger to everyone no matter their previous relationship. The current Grey Fox came upon the cowl 10 years ago, and has been missing, presumed dead ever since. The Thieves' Guild quest is to break the curse with the help of an Elder Scroll so the poor guy can actually reunite with his wife; without the curse broken, he could (and has) directly reveal himself to her without any recognition. With the curse broken, it's more Cursed with Awesome since while you're the Grey Fox with the cowl on, you can remove it and return to your normal identity at any time.
    • The vampire Lord Lovidicus was trapped within his quarters when his secret was discovered, leaving him starving for blood but unable to die. Decades later, the player character finds him but has to kill him in self defense, as he's gone stark raving mad with thirst.
  • Skyrim:
    • Reveals that this is the case for anyone or anything that dies under the effects of the Soul Trap spell. One quest requires you to enter a soul gem to remove the soul from it, revealing that the soul trapped inside is completely conscious and alive, left floating in nothingness except for a few crystal platforms potentially forever. Doing it on a man, mer, or beast-man requires a special black soul gem and is generally frowned upon.
      M'aiq The Liar: M'aiq was soul trapped once. Not very pleasant. You should think about that once in a while.
    • The Dawnguard DLC takes it even further, having a sequence in the Soul Cairn, a bleak Spirit World ruled over by the Ideal Masters where soul-trapped sapient souls end up for eternity. You think that random bandit's soul you trapped is simply "used up" when you recharge your weapon? Think again. The moment you do so, the soul is sent straight to the Soul Cairn. Where they remain. For the rest of eternity. There is absolutely no hope of escape or rescue. Ever. Nobody can remove your soul from the Cairn, and since you exist as a pure soul, you cannot even hope for the sweet release of death. While you are there, you can expect to be hunted down by undead horrors and have your soul's power drained and utilized for any number of horrific purposes. Even those who manage to successfully hide speak of merely being there as hellish; they exist in a constant state of fear, paranoia, and spiritual exhaustion, sure that they are constantly being watched by... something. The truly unlucky are turned into servants of the "Ideal Masters", the rulers of the Soul Cairn. The masters view this as peaceful immortality, but the afflicted souls are left in a state of unending psychological torment, only able to forever curse the beings who have entrapped them so. (Legendary in the Sequel Morrowind character Jiub is one of the souls who ends up here.)
      Wrathman: You have taken my life, and given me NOTHING! Eternal happiness? Life everlasting? No! Eternal nightmare! Death everlasting! Nothing now. Nothing forever more... What does it matter? It's not MY fault! You said I'd live forever. And this is LIFE? You CHEATED me! I HATE you!
• In Emperor: Battle for Dune, there are three factions the player can side with: the noble Atreides, the profit-driven Ordos, or the malevolent Harkonnens — each seeking control of the spice planet, Arrakis. If the player sides with the Ordos, they become strategists whose imperative is to seek control of territories on Arrakis. However, if the strategist doesn't fulfill their contract, they will be "terminated" (meaning have their head severed from their body and kept alive in robotic devices) as a permanent reminder and motivation to their eventual replacement. One unfortunate strategist quips: "Why don't they just let us die?" Dune 2000 has something similar in the Ordos Campaign — at one briefing, the Ordos Mentat warns that failure in any mission will result in permanent imprisonment in a "pain amplifier".
• Epic Mickey, despite being an E-rated game, has one of these with the first boss, Clock Tower, if you choose to kill it rather than redeem it. After melting the armour off its arms and tricking it into shattering them, its face and arm stumps fall into a lake of thinner, which is essentially hyper-powerful acid. Being an inanimate object anyway, Clock Tower's face is unable to move, but as it is a Disney creation, is sentient and can feel pain. It is still there at the end of the game.
• Eternal Darkness:
  • This seems to be the fate of Mantorok. Impaled by spikes and trapped between realities by his own Magick, Mantorok is often referred to as 'The Dead God', despite being clearly alive. One popular theory holds that, although being technically dead/dying, Mantorok is immortal and will therefore never actually die. Also, theoretically, no force in any universe can save him because his Magickal alignment is supreme.
  • Anthony and Ellia both remain entombed and live on for centuries within their own rotting bodies. Mercy Kill doesn't begin to describe it.
• In the Evadare series, specifically Evadare - Void and Evadare - Full Stop Punctuation, a good chunk of characters are in a state of suffering. One of them is Boomgueh, a man whose head explodes, only for it to regenerate to explode again.
• EVE Online chronicles has a few: First there are the horrific Methods of Torture. Then there is a story about an Amarrian useless prince has been holding court and pronouncing judgements on people for the heck of it. A Speaker of Truth shows up with a commoner mob at his back to exact judgement on the prince: A piece of flesh for each person he wronged. The catch is that he can't be killed because he is a prince, so they keep him alive all the way through surgery. Finally, there is the Jovian Wetgrave, where the test subject is successfully connected to a spaceship's sensors and controls, allowing him to pilot the ship with his mind. Unfortunately, he can't maintain the connection to the ship and can't connect back to his body, leaving him trapped within himself.
• Everhood: Those individuals that aren't hit so hard by The Fog of Ages they don't seem to be aware they're immortal haven't been handling it that well. Green Mage is a good example, as the one that's both more aware than it seems of everything going on, and who tasked themselves with counting the years. They're three million years in and counting, and they've gotten so bored with their existence that they were the ones to throw their own eyeball away in the forest, condemning themselves to years and years of wandering blindly in the dark. Why did they do this to themselves? They were just that bored, to the point making the years worse started to look like a good idea.
• Exile/Avernum: While they are naturally very long-lived (even without their periodic centuries-long hibernation), the most esteemed elders of the Vahnatai race are offered the chance to be magically infused into special stones, becoming immortal, magically powerful, but completely unmoving crystal souls. In Exile 3/Avernum 3, you can talk to the two crystal souls in the Vahnatai outpost; these are the two abducted by the Empire, and experimented with in unspoken ways for many, many years. One can't help itself from mentally 'screaming' into your mind when you 'talk' to it, and conversations can end with a horrible screeching sound if you try to ask too much about the Empire and its time there.
• Fallout
  • Fallout 3:
    • Vault 112 contains a set of pods that keep their occupants alive forever, their minds trapped in a virtual reality simulation as the playthings of the sadistic Overseer Dr. Stanislaus Braun, who tortures, kills, and revives them at his leisure. Most of the Vault's inhabitants have their memories altered so they don't realize this, but Old Lady Dithers has a malfunctioning pod, leaving her fully aware of the simulation but unable to do anything about it. When the Lone Wanderer becomes trapped in the simulation with his/her dad, he/she can activate a hidden fail-safe that kills all of the Vault's residents except for Braun, leaving him trapped alone inside the simulation, presumably forever. While this would normally be a horrible fate, for Braun, it was a fitting punishment for his atrocities.
    • In the same game, recurring character Harold has ended up grown into a tree on a cliff due to what is presumed to be the result of a FEV-induced mutation on his forehead some time in the past. According to himself, he has been rooted down for twenty to thirty years by the tree, named Bob, whom Harold calls Herbert for his own amusement (much to the tree's chagrin, apparently). In addition, he was eventually found by some of the wasteland residents, believing him to be a tree-god due to him having transformed the post-apocalypse-scarred area into a green oasis of trees and grass. These wastelanders went on to create a druidic, non-technological culture and religion with Harold as its center and god. The screaming part came when the religious "Treeminders" calculated that Harold would likely live entire centuries, if not millennia, rooted in the same place. Needless to say Harold, who was already extremely melancholic and tired from the decades he'd spent merged with the motionless tree, was Driven to Suicide following this revelation. But as a tree surrounded by religious loons who refuse to even as much as glare at their "god" the wrong way... yeah.
    • Depending on the player's choices, nobly subverted if you convince Harold that his existence brings happiness to others. He'll find a source of solace in this and, presumably, stop trying to off himself.
    • The human brain of a Robobrain unit is apparently still conscious and aware. Based on their dialog some of the robots subvert this trope as they apparently love randomly shooting people, but others play it straight as they constantly apologize for attacking the player and claim to hate what they are doing but their programming prevents them from being able to stop.
  • Several notable cases in Fallout: New Vegas:
    • The entire situation with the real Mr. House. If/when you decide to remove him, you have to enter the control room where his decrepit, ancient physical body is maintained by a Life Support Pod and once you open the pod, he is doomed to die because even a second's exposure to the microbacteria in the air is lethal to his unimmunized, 200+-years-old body. The player then has the choice of killing him, conventionally or by overloading the electrical circuits in his LSP, or, in an invocation of this trope, disconnecting his brain from the cerebral matrix of the Lucky 38 — leaving him conscious and sustained physically by the life support machine but barely able to twitch or speak, isolated/forgotten, and with no way to influence or even access his computer network until he finally expires. It's to the point that the game files even classify Mr. House as an abomination-type NPC rather than a human.
    • One of the ways to resolve the plot of the Dead Money add-on (which also grants an achievement) is to trick Father Elijah into entering the vault below the Sierra Madre (with or without taking the exorbitant amount of gold worth tens of thousands of caps for yourself). If the Courier remains hidden and reaches the exit from the vault area before Elijah can detonate their explosive collar, then he is left trapped in the sealed container with no sustainable source of food or water, doomed to die from dehydration/starvation whilst using the last moments of his audio connection to the Courier's collar to curse them.
    • If a morbidly curious Courier opts to fall for the same trick, then a Non-Standard Game Over plays where they themselves are the ones trapped inside the vault and doomed to die a slow, painful death.
    • The Y-17 Trauma Override Harness built in Big MT was designed to bring a soldier automatically back to camp. However, several bugs in the software of the suit included malfunctions in the IFF and the inability to sense if the wearer is even alive, resulting in an "unpredictable wandering state." It left anyone who wore the suit to watch helplessly as it gunned down friends and loved ones and wander aimlessly and ceaselessly before slowly dying of starvation or dehydration. Many of the suits continued to wander after the occupants died.
    • The Marked Men, hostile residents of the area called The Divide in the Lonesome Road add-on. Being ghoulified is already a pretty nasty fate, with certain perks, but for the Marked Men, ghoulification means they only continue to live after the perpetual storms in the Divide kick up winds so strong the flesh is torn off their bodies, leaving the muscle exposed. The Marked Men live their lives in such terrible pain with nothing at all that can dull it as a result. As a silver lining, it's erased any enmity they once held as members of NCR and Caesar's Legion, joining together in shared pain and the immense hatred for those who don't suffer like them. It's relatively minor in that they still can act and even retain some semblance of themselves, but years upon years of being flayed alive by the very place they're trapped in has to count in some way.
  • Fallout 4:
    • One side quest leads to an encounter with a child who was ghoulified and who's been trapped in a fridge for 210 years (with no explanation as to how he's still alive or even still mentally sound).
    • In the Nuka-World add-on, the Sole Survivor and Sierra Petrovita (traveling south from D.C.) can meet John-Caleb Bradberton, the inventor of Nuka-Cola. Before the bombs fell he cheated death by making an agreement with the U.S. government to become a test subject for their immortality research. Unfortunately, they were only able to preserve his head and he was conscious the entire time, leaving him staring at the walls of a hidden Vault for more than two centuries, unable to die. When the player encounters him, he begs them to shut off the power in order to turn off his life support system. Sierra then begs the player to keep him alive, offering to keep him company in the hopes of making him less suicidal (which he refuses, knowing full well as we do that he'd go back to being alone forever once she's dead). Whether to end or prolong his suffering is left up to the player.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • Espers, living beings borne out of magic, can be "reduced" to Magicite when killed. Some even do it themselves to strike back against the Empire or to assist their allies. But regardless of intention or method, Espers are still fully conscious and aware even as they are nothing more than a green gemstone, from the whimsical kitty Stray to the powerful Bahamut.
    • The Esper Tritoch (known as Valigarmanda in the Pixel Remaster) was encased in ice since the War of the Magi, 1000 years prior to the start of the game, and was only very recently unearthed. Given he can still interact (and do battle) with intruders, it's reasonable to assume he spent the majority of those 1000 years sealed underground, aware, and immobile in his prison of ice.
    • The Warring Triad, who willingly turned themselves to stone, may also be examples of this. Kefka's ability to communicate with them (and even encourage them to attack Gestahl) certainly proves they're still conscious.
    • Similar to Tritoch, there's the story of Odin. A king turned into an Esper, he was turned to stone in his own throne room as he defended his kingdom during the War of the Magi, and has enough awareness to reduce himself to Magicite to aid the party when they discover him in the ruins of his castle—which itself had lain in a sunken cave beneath the sea for 1001 years. Worse still, the next room over (accessible only by way of a hidden floor switch) has the petrified remains of his Queen, an otherwise normal human who seemingly tried to hide from their enemies but suffered the same fate regardless. When the party shows her the Odin Magicite, she sheds tears that upgrade him into Raiden, implying she, too, had some degree of awareness in her state.
  • Final Fantasy VII:
    • After being hurled into the Lifestream by Cloud after the Nibelheim Incident, Sephiroth spends FIVE YEARS immobile at the Northern Creater, absorbing the knowledge of countless dead & gradually learning how to manipulate Jenova. Is it any surprise that he's a little bit ticked off at his spiky-headed nemesis? That's not even getting into the fact that he could only maintain his individuality by focusing on a few aspects of his personality and ditching the rest. In the end, the only thing left in Sephiroth's mind that wasn't related to Jenova's imperative to kill everything on the Planet and suck it dry of lifeforce was his hatred of the lowly grunt that nearly killed him.
    • Seto's mind and awareness are implied to be intact given that he sheds tears after Nanaki's speech, despite being turned to stone.
    • Vincent Valentine, after years of experimentation, had in fact become immortal. It doesn't help the fact that most of his life was filled with misery of losing his love, Lucrecia, and the turmoil of her giving birth to Sephiroth, among other things. Though Word of God states that in the far future, while all their friends had passed away, Red XIII has a very long lifespan, so Vincent visits him once a year to ease his friend's fear of being alone.
  • Final Fantasy VIII:
    • Adel was locked into a technological "tomb" and launched into orbit to keep her sorceress powers sealed, and spent seventeen years this way before being freed by Ultimecia to use as a vessel. Rinoa almost undergoes the same process voluntarily, but Squall talks her out of it. Just to top up your nightmare fuel tank, remember that scene where Rinoa and the SeeDs attempt to get into the TV station in Timber, and pass a big screen showing red static? Rinoa says it's caused by radio interference. If you look closely, though, it says, "bringmebackthereiamalivehereiwillneverletyouforgetaboutme" over and over again. And what, do you remember, caused the interference? I am alive here...
    • Rinoa narrowly avoided this fate when she was launched into space. Sorceresses cannot die without passing on their powers, which is why no one just killed Adel, so if Squall hadn't rescued her, Rinoa would have drifted forever without any way to pass on her powers so she could die.
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • The only known way to defeat Sin is for a summoner and his guardian to perform the Final Summoning. The guardian (a close relative or friend to the summoner) is transformed into the Final Aeon. What the summoners and guardians don't know is that, once the Final Aeon "destroys" Sin, he is then possessed by the spirit within (known as Yu Yevon) and transformed into a new Sin. The guardian remains conscious of the carnage Yu Yevon is causing using his body but is helpless and out of his control, trapped inside Sin's shell until a new Final Aeon takes their place. The summoner at least gets a quick death by the psychic blast when Yu Yevon possesses the Final Aeon.
    • Similarly, each Aeon represents the spirit of a person who willingly sacrificed their lives to benefit a summoner. We learn later that the body and mind of that person are encased in crystal, potentially forever.
  • Final Fantasy XIII has the Cie'th Stones. In the game's story, humans live alongside strange and powerful beings, the fal'Cie. Occasionally, a fal'Cie will choose someone to perform an important task, a "Focus"; these chosen humans are known as "l'Cie", and are branded with a mark that counts down the time they have remaining to complete their Focus. If a l'Cie fails to complete their Focus in time, they are transformed into horrific shambling monsters, Cie'th. Being turned into a Cie'th is horrifying enough and involves stripping an individual of their five senses, plunging them into black flames and forcing them wander in eternal darkness, their words turning into a song of agony, their screams a curse of death, and so they remain until someone merciful enough destroys their soul... but if a Cie'th is left to wander for many years, they are eventually consumed by despair and become Cie'th Stones, living statues whose only thoughts are regret at failing to complete their Focus and no hope of release as Cie'th Stones, unlike Cie'ths, are completely harmless.
  • Final Fantasy XIV's use of the theme is frequent enough to categorize by expansion:
    • A Realm Reborn (2.0)
      That the Dread Wyrm Bahamut emerges from Dalamud at the end of 1.0 is bad enough, implying that the city-sized dragon was sealed within since time immemorial. But 2.0 reveals that not only has he been imprisoned by the Allagan Empire within the false moon for the last 5000 years, but he's actually a Primal — a Physical God summoned by his draconic followers (all of whom are, with the passage of time, descended from him when he still was a living being, and whom he therefore sees as his children). But since destroying a Primal's physical form means he could be summoned again, and again, Allag instead captured him, as well as countless of his offspring, imprisoned them all in Dalamud, and then subjected the latter to physical agony, mental torment, and Mind Control, so that they kept crying out for Bahamut to save them and therefore keep him alive, conscious, and in a constant state of summoning. It's no wonder that when Bahamut is finaly released, his wrath is incandescent.
      Associated to the above: despite being (temporarily) destroyed by Louisoix during the Calamity, Bahamut's will was so massive he was still able to "Temper", that is, flood Louisoix's mind with so much aether he completely dominated the man's mind. Even after being reborn as the Primal Phoenix himself, Louisoix was fully enthralled by Bahamut despite his conscious human mind wishing for release for the last five years. Thankfully, when the Warrior of Light and Louisoix's grandchildren arrive to put a definitive end to Bahamut, they are first able to release Louisoix from enthrallment and he is able to pass on as himself.
    • Heavensward (3.0):
      At the finale of the original 3.0 expansion, Estinien, the Azure Dragoon, takes possession of both eyes of the wyrm Nidhogg, the dragon who had waged a thousand-year war on Estinien's nation of Ishgard and whom Estinien and the Warrior of Light had finally slain earlier in the story. But a dragon's eyes are known to be vessels of their will, and are huge reservoires of aether to boot, so when Estinien, his armor still soaked red from Nidhogg's blood, takes hold of both eyes (as the Azure Dragoon, he previously possessed only one to use as a power boost) Nidhogg is able to immediately possess him and warp his body into a draconic/human hybrid. Nidhogg then proceeds to continue his war for the next three patches, and patch 3.3 reveals that Estinien had been desperately Fighting from the Inside all the while and in the end, when Nidhogg has been weakened enough to allow Estinien's consciousness to surface, he begs the Warrior of Light to end him while there's a chance. The Warrior and Alphinaud Take a Third Option, however.
    • Stormblood (4.0)
      A more benign version than most, but, at the end of the Omega raids, it's shown that the folks at the Ironworks have constructed a toy version of the deadly interstellar robot, and they give it to Alpha to accompany him on his travels much like the Warrior of Light's own wind-up toys. But supplementary materials reveal that, in their final moments, Omega transferred their consciousness into the toy's rudimentary Magitek core, and although they cannot communicate, they can still observe and document their experiences. Two expansions later, this is confirmed canon in-game when the Ironworks install a voice module on the toy body, and Omega regains a modicum of identity and independence. But, in another timeline where the Warrior died before their time, Omega spent at least 200 years as nothing but a silent toy who could do nothing but watch the end of civilization and the slow rebirth of hope.
      Related to the above: the entire reason Omega took action against the realm and pitted the Warrior of Light against fantastical opponents from myth and legend is because they greatly desired to understand the strength of "heart", or soul, that made people like the Warrior surpass any obstacle. With this power, perhaps Omega could finally find a way back home across the cosmos. But Cid rebukes them, saying that the only reason Omega didn't completely lose their mind on the original trip was because they, as an artificial intelligence, didn't have a soul that would be irreparably broken by the solitude of traveling through space for thousands of years, and that no living being, that is, one possessed of a soul, like Omega desired, could ever withstand that trip.
    • Shadowbringers (5.0):
      Ardbert is prepared to perform a Heroic Sacrifice with his friends to save his world from the all-consuming light. Ardbert and his friends are already dead, so they sacrifice their souls to aid Minfilia in stemming the flood of light. She stops Ardbert from sacrificing himself, saying that he has a bigger role to play and his time to play said the role will come. For the next one hundred years, Ardbert wandered about as a ghost and was unable to interact with anyone since no one could see or hear him. He went insane from effectively being isolated and was nothing more than an anguished spirit, but his mind became sharp again when he runs into the player character.
    • Endwalker (6.0):
      It is revealed that all the Ancient souls who sacrificed themselves to summon the Elder Primal, Zodiark, to save their world, still reside and remain conscious within him, even after 12,000 years and the Sundering of the world. However, after so much time spent in the throes of anguish and terror that prompted the summoning of Zodiark in the first place, their minds have begun to degrade, and the once brilliant demigods and stewards of the star are now reduced to shambling ghosts who wail for release.
      When a Voidsent consumes a soul, it's not just their aether that they devour. The soul's memories and personalities come along too, and if the devourer's mind isn't strong enough, they risk being taken over by the very entity they tried to devour, or having their mind shattered by all the souls they've consumed and thus becoming a broken mix of all their minds. But, if they are powerful and strong-willed enough, their own mind retains dominance and it is the devoured souls which sink into darkness, anxiously waiting for the day their "host" is themselves destroyed so that they can escape. But given the way the food chain works in the World of Darkness, it is highly unlikely for high-ranking Voidsent to be killed, so chances for their consumed souls to find release are... slim. And considering the oldest among the kings and queens of the Voidsent are 10,000 years old... The Cloud of Darkness, considered one of the top, if not the highest-ranking Voidsent in existence, is so powerful that even destruction lasts only a few seconds, so any and all of her component souls is utterly powerless to escape her grip, technically making them the worst hit by this trope in the game's entire history.
      The warders of Pandæmonium all wield "interment magicks", binding the target and place and keeping them in stasis for the warders to study. The story never shows a method to break this spell from the inside, meaning that the victim is conscious, frozen, and alive to be studied like a sample under the microscope for all eternity unless someone else purposefully sets them free. Normally this is only used on violent monsters so they can be kept for research purposes, but there are at least two points in the story where the heroes are threatened with these same magicks.
    • Dawntrail (7.0):
      In a full reference to Final Fantasy VI above, Valigarmanda, here a type of entity known as Tural Vidraal, was tricked by Gulool Ja Ja and his band of allies to use its own calamitous ice magicks on itself, unwittingly sealing itself in a mountain-sized block of ice. Eighty years later, Valigarmanda has been fully conscious, aware, and unbelievably pissed off, so as soon as the ice begins to weaken it starts thrashing about and it's up to the claimants to the throne to perform a ritual to re-seal it in ice.
  • In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, this is the final fate of Galdes. He's doomed to world-jump forever to undo his defeat, but there's no world anywhere that Yuri and co don't beat him. The last thing you hear of him is a mental "Help me..."
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening shows this to be the ultimate fate of The Avatar if they are possessed by Grima. He/She is trapped in a void, fully aware of what the Dragon is doing to the land and people he/she loves and being totally unable to free him/herself or stop the slaughter.
  • The Revelations rendition of "Lost in Thoughts All Alone" in Fire Emblem Fates.
    Sing with me a song
    Of silence and blood
    The rain falls but can't wash away the mud
    Within my ancient heart dwells madness and pride
    Can no one hear my cry?
• Alma from First Encounter Assault Recon was sealed inside a psychically shielded chamber as an eight-year-old child and kept in an induced coma, and used to manufacture psychic Super Soldiers. However even while comatose, she remained fully aware of what was happening to her, right up to the point that she was killed. After death, her mind remained intact and sealed inside the vault for another thirty years. It isn't difficult to understand that when she finally gets out, people die.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • This is heavily implied to be the case of the children murdered by William Afton. Specifically, Afton killed them in Fazbear's Pizza, which somehow ended up binding their spirits to the animatronics which entertain the restaurant's guests during the day and go on murderous rampages at night. In other words, picture cheerful, happy children being brutally killed, then trapped for eternity in nightmarish mobile suits, with little to no control over their motor functions, forced to watch other children having the time of their lives while they suffered silently. The third game reveals even further details about the torments found in the game. Even if the animatronic suits are destroyed, the children's spirits aren't freed from them — only the actions of the player can do that. In the Downer Ending, the final shot shows the severed heads of the animatronics with the eyes still glowing, suggesting that now, the children are stuck immobile and unable to speak, and will be that way forever.
    • In Ultimate Custom Night it's established that Afton's first victim, The Puppet, was the only one who retained their sapience (aside from maybe Golden Freddy). The others were reduced to rabid "animals", too broken and angry to even comprehend that they're killing the wrong people until the player resolves their Unfinished Business.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location gives this to the Funtime animatronics, built and programmed to abduct and murder children... and totally unaware of that. For the kicker, the murdering is instinctive and involuntary: for robots who genuinely adore kids and wanted nothing more than entertain and care for them, it's such a hellish situation that they would rather slaughter an innocent technician and slip into his hollowed out corpse to escape the factory.
  • Afton himself was subjected to this after he was Killed Off for Real, condemned to an Ironic Hell by Golden Freddy where the animatronics murder him over and over.
• Lady Furina of Fontaine in Genshin Impact is a self-inflicted version. Though they are free to act as they please in public and enjoy all the luxuries of life, it's all a facade. Beneath the Mask, they are absolutely exhausted of the role they've been placed on, which they have kept for 500 years. The crux of their torment is how they could not tell this to anyone, lest their enemies find out and undo everything, ensuring they must bear this burden in solitude for centuries. And while theoretically they could just leave, that's not an option either as it would doom the nation they swore to protect. They are effectively imprisoned in a role they could not leave from, all alone, for hundreds of years. Thankfully it all paid off and she is released of her imprisonment at the end of the Archon Quest.
  "So interminable... So lonely... Just how much longer...? Hundreds of years must have passed by now. Perhaps this show must go on for hundreds more... I never imagined that it would hurt so much..."
• Towards the end of Ghost Trick, Sissel, Lynne, Kamila, Missile's ghost, and Yomiel are left trapped in a submarine that's slowly sinking towards the bottom of the ocean. Kamila and Lynne will obviously die, but the other three will be left as ghosts to forever haunt the dark wreckage. Scary enough. But in Ray's timeline, where Sissel never tried to help out Lynne, it still happened... except Yomiel was down there alone.
• God of War:
  • Aegaeon the Hecatonchires in God of War: Ascension. After breaking his blood oath to Zeus, the Furies hunted him down and put him through the mother of all Fates Worse than Death: having his body hollowed out and turned into a giant prison for those who followed his example. And then Megaera uses her parasites to infest different parts of his body and turn them into monsters to fight Kratos. Judging by the way his eyes are moving when Megaera infests his head, he's still alive and fully conscious through it all.
  • God of War: Chains of Olympus: After being defeated by Kratos, Atlas is shackled and forced to stand atop the Pillar of the World, carrying the world itself on his shoulders for all eternity.
  • God of War II: After providing the Fires of Olympus to mankind, Prometheus was punished by Zeus by being stripped of his powers, chained to Typhon's fingers, and being disemboweled and Eaten Alive by a giant eagle everyday with his wounds automatically healing by nightfall. Kratos actually ends up Mercy Killing him at his own request.
  • God of War (PS4):
    • After a prank on Odin went wrong, Mimir was punished by having his body magically fused to an indestructible tree and has, by the time you find him, been stuck there for 109 winters. As a solution to his predicament he tells Kratos to cut off his head, take it to the Witch in the Woods and have her reanimate it. When Kratos comments that, if the Witch fails, then Mimir will be dead, the man forlornly admits that Odin tortures him every single day, and that Odin has no shortage of creativity when it comes to cruelty.
      Mimir: This... this isn't living.
    • Freya gave her son Baldur invincibility after hearing a prophecy say he will die a needles death. Unfortunately, this came with the side effect of robbing him of his senses. He cannot taste, smell and feel anything anymore. Food, drink, and pleasure are all deprived from him and after a century of living like this, he's gone insane.
• Guild Wars 2:
  • In Path of Fire, it's revealed that Palawa Joko attempted to inflict this on the Last Spearhmarshal, Tahlkora. After he killed and Awakened her he found she was able to resist his control. So he took back nearly all of the Awakening magic, leaving her a soul bound to an inanimate corpse, and had it dumped on an isolated plateau where nobody would find it for centuries. The trope was narrowly averted when Kormir granted Tahlkora the ability to see through the eyes of her griffon companions and communicate mentally with those nearby.
  • Saul d'Alessio was bound in a specially-crafted prison cell by the Mursaat centuries ago where he has been constantly tormented by a demon crafted from his own guilt and failings.
• Grim Dawn: The Arkovian Undead suffer from this, after the Arkovian Empire captured the Father of Necromancy and tried to torture the secret of immortality out of him. He gave them exactly that: No matter what happened to them, no matter what violence, disease or time itself did to them, they would never die. Ever. Arkovia itself is an ancient ruin by now, yet it still crawls with skeletons and ghosts that will immediately attack you in their madness and hatred for those who can still die — they have been awake and suffering the entire time. You even find a note in the ruins of their old Coliseum chronicling exactly how they found out the curse was in place: A scheduled Curb-Stomp Battle between their champion and a criminal condemned to death, that never truly got to the "death" part.
  The crowd watched in silence, horror and awe frozen on their faces, as Karnath delimbed the man, who screamed all the while for mercy, but he would not die. His blood had long stopped pumping, but still he would not die.
• Half-Life:
  • The Headcrab Zombies. Just go ahead and kill them before the damn things have to suffer for one more second. In this instance, though, they can scream, and they are very, very vocal. Their cries are especially disturbing if they played backwards. They mostly consists of repeated panicked variations on "Dear God!" and "HELP ME!" Set one on fire. What you get is horribly anguished, muffled screaming, indicating that the "zombie" knows what is going on. They can feel the pain. These poor wretches can survive without their lower torso. It's implied that the unfortunate victims and hosts of the headcrabs are aware of the horrible things they are doing and what has happened to them but are powerless to stop. What sounds like a creepy roar, when played backwards, is actually them screaming for help and pleading for you to kill them. This also goes for the zombified Combine soldiers (AKA 'Zombine'); when the pitch of their radio chatter is altered, they can quite clearly be heard saying things like "Necrotics imbound", "Infestation", and "Sector is...not secure...", trying to warn their surviving comrades.
  • In Half-Life: Opposing Force, the eventual fate of Adrian Shepherd is to be "preserved" in a place where he can do no possible harm... and no harm can come to him. This takes the form of floating through an alien dimension on a plane, alone, indefinitely. (Some fans argue that this is similar to Gordon Freeman's stay with the G-Man, which he came out of some ten years later, looking just fine, so it may just be a cryogenic sleep of sorts.)
  • The Stalkers in Half-Life 2. They've been forcibly captured and horribly mutilated by the Combine. All four limbs have been amputated and most of their digestive system removed. They are kept alive by some form of nutrient fluid which is being fed to them through an externally implanted hatch located just at the side of their belly. Moreover, their sexual organs have been roughly removed as well, leaving only a scar between their legs. Their eyes and ears have been removed too, being replaced with more crude horrific combine gadgets instead. Oh, and they don't have tongues either, leaving them with a variety of gruesome, animal-like moans and screams as their only means to "communicate" with the outside world, if you want to call it that. And the worst of all of this? These poor folks are technically still fully human.
• In The Halloween Hack, one of the citizens of Dr. Andonuts' Magicant invokes this by telling you that they're all doomed to repeat the same action over and over again. Funnier than it sounds.
• The Flood in Halo does this to any sentient it infects. It causes a host to mutate, replacing any "useless" components with Flood organs, while retaining "useful" aspects of its host. Unfortunately for the host, the higher cognitive systems are considered to be a "useful" function, and the Flood will preserve its hosts' awareness so it can tap into their knowledge. Since the Flood also has no regard for the comfort of the host and otherwise take over all motor nerves, the host must continue to exist in pain while being forced to experience themselves doing horrible things to spread the Flood to others. The only "natural" escape from this is when the host body gets so worn down and damage that it becomes otherwise no longer useful to the Flood and bloats into a carrier form which will burst apart into several infection forms, continuing the cycle. The Forerunner Saga shows that even physical death won't necessarily stop your torment, as every individual consciousness ever absorbed into the Flood remains intact enough to be manifested by the Gravemind whenever it wishes to, mostly to troll its enemies.
• A Happy Place: While all the inhabitants of Kittland are trapped, the spirits in Calcium Catacombs are the only ones who seem fully aware of it. The giant ghost heads met in the Dark World section claim the island is feeding off them, and they've lost all hope of escape. They can only wait in fear as more and more of them disappear.
• Heart of the Machine: Torment Vessels are a variation of your usual VR systems, in that they use a lot more of the user's brainpower to supply your own computing power, but in exchange the only experience they provide is utter agony. No one is going to use them willingly, so if you want to go down this path you'll have to start doing some kidnapping and research ways to keep them fed intravenously, so they never, ever get to escape. You do have the option to target the upper class exclusively though, if you're feeling less cruel and more vengeful.
• This is the basic premise of the Spirit Overload ending in Hellsinker. The Prayers are also like this, ever praying for a release that never comes. Cause even if destroyed they will just ressurect a while later.
• Hollow Knight: Silksong:
  • The Haunting can either overtake bug's mind and force it into aggression... or suspend the bug in the air on many strings of silk, leaving them fully conscious, but only able to twitch and whimper akin to fly in a web... while also being presumably Mind Raped. This is exactly how denizens of Bellhart have been for some time before Hornet managed to kill Widow, a Weaver responsible for inducing The Haunting on the city, with freed denizens confirming they were aware and couldn't be more thankful it was finally over.
  • In the depths of Citadel's Whiteward is a pit for discarded experiments on Silk. They are still aware, but either stuck as zombies manipulated by Silk, completely immobile or form The Unravelled. As mentioned in Hunter's Journal entry for the latter, even after it's defeat they will persist down there for a long time and not even Hornet will be able to fully cleanse them.
• In Homeworld: Cataclysm, the Bentusi (an advanced space-faring race who exist as individuals physically linked with their ships) prefer suicide to being captured and corrupted by 'The Beast' — an infection entity that takes control over any ship it touches. Normally, it converts the crew of a ship into 'bio-matter' that is recycled into bio-circuitry. With the Bentusi, who are linked directly to the ship itself, the beast's infection renders the ship's sole crew member completely paralyzed and corrupted, unable to move or act of their own accord. As such, any Bentusi who is infected will destroy itself before being corrupted.
• Horizon Forbidden West reveals that this is what actually happened to Ted Faro. In an attempt to make himself immortal so he can be the one to tell Elisabet Sobeck's children his recollection of the Faro Plague, he had biological experimentation done that halted his aging process and made his cells multiply at a breakneck rate. This was before the doctor that did it to him and the doctor's daughter were Driven to Suicide because of how bad a boss Faro was, thus his cells kept multiplying and multiplying with no way to stop the process until he became... something that doesn't even sound human after a millennium of feeding on his own bunker's geothermal generator, though it's safe to assume that he became a horrifying blob of flesh that the Quen Ceo was repulsed with on sight.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a whole game dedicated to this theme, based on the Trope Namer short story.
  • Yes, you can play it into such a state that you become what the quote describes.
    Ted: Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don't know. AM has been having fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense. He made certain I would suffer eternally and could not do myself in. He left my mind intact. I can dream, I can wonder, I can lament. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone.
    I have no mouth. And I must scream.
  • The game also makes it clear that AM himself is suffering from this trope in spades. He is a mighty AI with enormous powers of creation and destruction, but his area of influence is extremely limited; not only is he trapped on Earth within the circuits of his own complex, unable to move or even sensate, but also due to his programming, he is forced to constantly think about warfare, torture, and death, removing any ability to do or create anything original with his vast powers. AM is effectively immortal, potentially to the point that the universe falling to entropy is the only way he'll finally die. He is fully aware of this, and it's what makes him so damn furious all the time — aside from his sadism, he tortures the five human characters because he despises humanity as a whole for creating him and making him smart enough to realize how trapped he is within his own body. It completely baffles AM when the players act against his expectations of mankind's cruelty and selfishness, and his Id cries out over this fact if you show him compassion.
    AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be.
• In Incredibox - Express, Gerald is a former human who is gruesomely converted to a machine that enhances a train's performance.
• In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, the Big Bads' ultimate fate is being sealed, still alive and conscious, inside a silo of Dark Eco.
• A more mundane and tragic example occurs in Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. In the real world, Jimmy is essentially trapped in his own body. He's aware of the world around him, but his chemotherapy treatments make him so tired and weak he can't move or talk to his family.
• In Chapter 18 of Kid Icarus: Uprising, Pit's mind is trapped in a ring. He cannot move or communicate with anyone unless they are wearing the ring themselves. It takes a while for this to sink in, because Pit doesn't really realize how terrible it is until Magnus starts walking away from the ring. All Pit could do was beg for Magnus to wear the ring, but Magnus couldn't even hear him.
• A nice handful of people in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep have pretty horrible fates. No worries, though. Sora's probably going to save 'em, along with any other good person who dies and/or disappears in the series.
  • Despite the implication that she was going to be saved, Aqua had to endure a horrible fate after sacrificing herself to save Terra. As a result, she was trapped in the Realm of Darkness for at least ten years. More so, she had to endure fighting Heartless for that many years and was plagued by the thought that one of her friends had fallen to darkness, and the other was in a coma. By the time Riku and Mickey went into the Realm of Darkness to save her, the darkness finally got to her (with some help from Ansem, Seeker of Darkness) and Aqua fully succumbed to it, attacking them as a result.
  • Also implied to happen to Ansem the Wise after the betrayal of his apprentices, when he was trapped in the realm of Darkness and became DiZ.
    • Special mention goes to Terra's fate: his lingering consciousness is trapped inside of his Keyblade Armor and marooned on a virtually inaccessible world, unable to focus on anything besides his hatred for Xehanort and his promise that he will, someday, set things right. It's little wonder that the Lingering Will is a tad unbalanced when Sora accidentally encounters it, having a brief breakdown when Sora's presence reminds it of Xehanort and rampaging until Sora beats it to calm it down.
    • Oh, and Terra's body? Currently in the possession of the person who placed him in that state, made even worse by the fact that there's evidence that there's still some of the original owner's being left in there, unable to fight off the intruder without his mind and heart.
    • And that's not to mention what happened to Terra's heart. It turns out that this whole time the Guardian Entity that Ansem has been using is in fact a container for Terra's heart. Seeing as his mouth is strapped, this means that he had been essentially forced into serving and fighting for the bad guys against his will, all the while unable to even speak at all.
• The Unkillable Skeleton in Kingdom of Loathing was a criminal sentenced to death who couldn't be killed, even when the electric chair burned off all his flesh. Even after he's defeated and his finger bone is taken as a trophy he's still alive, trying to point at things. Ed the Undying is in a similar, though lesser position: The "Actually Ed the Undying" path shows he can recover after a brief trip to the underworld, but he still has to spend a not-insignificant amount of time as an immobile pile of bone shards swept into a corner of his own pyramid, cursing the name of whoever beat him into bone meal again.
• The Lord of the Dead in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow was once a man, but while still alive he was enslaved to the throne of the Underworld. Unable to free himself or move anything more than his hand, he was forced to witness every horror and tragedy when the spirits of the dead made their way to him. His humanity seeped away as he grew numb to the horror and became something else entirely. And he will never be free of what has been done to him.
  Narrator: His is an existence that has no possibility of redemption, no end.
• The Kirby franchise is full of these for a Sugar Bowl setting:
  • Probably the most direct example is in Kirby's Return to Dream Land, Magolor betrays the four heroes to get the Master Crown and to gain immense power. Things get pretty bad for him when the crown corrupts him further and turn him into what the game calls a "sad husk", and even implies he no longer has control anymore. Unlike some other examples, he actually gets rescued from this ordeal, and tries to redeem himself after returning to life.
  • President Haltmann, the Big Bad from Kirby: Planet Robobot tried to use Star Dream to its full potential in order to destroy Kirby, but when Susie causes things to go horribly wrong, the AI takes him over and believes all living life should be destroyed. The And I Must Scream comes from the fact that he's still sentient throughout all of this. He has to watch this omnicidal machine while regretting trying to use it to get his daughter back. The only way Kirby is able to rescue him is by destroying the machine his soul is stuck in (where you literally hear his screams).
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land:
    • Leongar goes through this. After he is possessed by Soul Forgo and becomes Forgo Leon, his roars start sounding more like screams of utter pain as Soul Forgo Mind Rapes him to keep fighting. It's especially made important by the fact that Leongar's been controlled by Fecto Forgo for nearly the entire game.
    • Speaking of Soul Forgo, it itself is also an example. After its initial defeat, it was held at the highest level of Lab Discovera in the Eternal Capsule. There, it was experimented on for many years and turned into a tourist attraction. While already evil, this experience drove it insane. It’s highlighted by "Forgo Land", the final stage of Forgo Dreams, created by the alien's dreams. It's a recreation of Lab Discovera, with its music theme including the lab's intercom announcement on an endless loop. In other words, the Soul Forgo developed an endless nightmare due to its years of isolation.
  • Kirby Air Riders: Zorah is an "inorganic life-form" with a consciousness, but no ability to move on its own. It landed on Planet Popstar a long time ago, and got stuck in the same spot for potentially thousands if not millions of years, with the plot of "Road Trip" mode being kicked off by its desperation to escape its predicament. Things don't get much better after Galactic Nova gets involved: while a fragment of Zorah's will manages to escape on its own, Zorah's main core is trapped within Gigantes, which can't move until an Air Ride machine with a strong will approaches it, and will attempt to destroy the world once it can move.
• Last Scenario: Ethan spent three years trapped in Biorite, semi-conscious but unable to move or speak. That's bad enough, but then you meet Tiamat, who spent 300 years in a similar state while sealed in the Ether Well.
• The Legacy of Kain series features several examples:
  • Legacy of Kain: Defiance implies that between the end of Soul Reaver 2 and the start of Defiance, Raziel has spent half a millennium in the spectral realm, presumably being tormented by the Elder God, though it may actually be that the 500 years passed much slower than they actually would in the real world, because Time Stands Still in the spectral realm.
  • At the end of Defiance, Raziel winds up trapped in a Stable Time Loop, first inside the Soul Reaver sword, then grafted onto his former self's arm when the sword is destroyed. It's probably not so bad, though; the Soul Reaver (and presumably Raziel as well) was purified at the spirit forge. It was a curse for the imperfect Soul Reaver, but perhaps the purified one isn't a tortured existence.
  • After it was realized that not even having his heart ripped out would stop Kain, the Elder God tried to collapse the ruins of the Vampire Citadel on top of him, burying the vampire for all eternity. Tried being the operative word.
    "You may ponder the futility of your ambitions as you spend a deathless eternity beneath a mountain of rubble: you and your Soul Reaver will go equally mad as the eons pass."
  • In the intro to Soul Reaver, Raziel is executed by being cast into The Lake of the Dead. Water burns like acid for vampires, but the Lake's waters operate so slowly that the official sentence is to "burn forever." As such, Raziel spends several hundred, if not thousand, years burning alive before finally dissolving and awakening in the Underworld. His lower jaw also fell off while he was in the Lake, meaning he literally couldn't scream.
• In The Legend of Kyrandia Book 1, Malcolm turns Kallak to stone, but leaves his eyes, claiming "I shed no tears for Kyrandia, but cannot deny you yours."
• In Legend of Legaia, the fate of the people of Conkram, and for a comparatively brief time, those of Rim Elm. Both towns are engulfed by a massive Sim-Seru that has fused with the town and all its inhabitants. There are heavy implications that the great pain has driven most of Conkram's inhabitants insane.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • A Link to the Past:
    • Some of the trees in the Dark World — like the Flute Boy in the Haunted Grove — are actually people. They're able to talk, and are very unhappy about their condition.
    • The seven maidens, each trapped in a block of crystal after being sent to the Dark World.
  • Ocarina of Time:
    • Following its defeat at the hands of Link, Phantom Ganon is banished by Ganondorf to the gap between dimensions, where it will likely be trapped for all eternity. It can be seen visibly convulsing in pain as the portal consumes it.
    • The Skultulla Cursed Family could very well fit in this trope. They can't free themselves and it being a side-quest, you could skip it completely. It gets kind of worse. You do, after all, free some of them. But chances are you didn't free them all. Which means that some of the relatives are still trapped in that shape after the end of the game. And that they will watch the saved ones grow old and die, leaving the still cursed one alone, forever.
  • In Majora's Mask, the Deku Butler's son was also turned into a tree. It's implied that they're actually dead though it's vague. In the case of the Deku Butler, he is seen at the end of the game, in front of the tree his son was transformed into, seemingly mourning.
  • Jovani from Twilight Princess sold his soul to the Poes and was turned into a living gold-and-jewel statue. He can still talk, but that's not much help since he's stuck in his house until you find a way in. After you find enough Poe Souls, he can move again, but he's still made of gold, so he can't leave the house out of fear of being seen in this state. His cat also suffers the same fate.
  • Skyward Sword:
    • The entire Lanayru desert is littered by the time-ravaged, rusted remains of the Ancient Robots, a population of robots who used to thrive in the past, when the desert was a luscious forest filled with precious "Timeshift Stones". It's implied they may be still active, reacting with a pitiful beep when you try to communicate with them. One of them, restored to life by a "Timeshift Stone" (that "resets" his personal timeline to a point in the past) is shown to be fully aware of being living on borrowed time.
    • Lanayru himself until you heal him, died a long time before Link can first meet him. So, you can only meet a rotten skull, staring at you with his empty eyesockets as you try to communicate with him.
    • The Big Bad himself, Demise, appears first as The Imprisoned, an inhuman monster, scattered and sealed in a mystical pillar since ancient times, unable even to restore his physical appearance for ages.
    • Skyward Sword also adds a retroactive And I Must Scream for Fi in The Wind Waker. It has always been highly implied that the Master Sword is an Empathic Weapon. This is given new meaning with the introduction of Fi in Skyward Sword, since we now know that the sword's vague consciousness actually belongs to a sentient being, who eventually was even revealed to be capable of emotion. Flash Forward to The Wind Waker: You leave the Master Sword and all eventual remains of Fi's consciousness stuck to rot in Ganondorf's petrified corpse for all eternity. Given that it broke the curse, or at least a very major product of it, it might be the best thing to ever happen to her.
  • Breath of the Wild:
    • The best warriors of four major tribes—the Zora, the Gorons, the Gerudo, and the Rito—were dubbed "Champions" and selected to pilot massive Magitek creatures called Divine Beasts in the fight against Calamity Ganon. Unfortunately, when the Calamity awakened, the first thing it did was possess those Divine Beasts with aspects of itself known as "Blights". Said Blights viciously murdered the Champions and trapped their spirits inside the creatures for a hundred years, leaving them helpless witnesses to Hyrule's destruction. Later, when the seal on Ganon starts to break, the Divine Beasts begin rampaging again, and the Champions are Forced to Watch the creatures gradually get closer and closer to their tribes' homes with dangerous attacks that threaten to wipe out the peoples from the land. It's particularly bad in the case of Mipha, the Zora Champion—since the Zora are incredibly long-lived, her father and brother are still alive, and she may have to watch them die thanks to her Beast's incessant rainfall.
    • The King of Hyrule tells you this once he reveals his identity as the Old Man on the Great Plateau. He explains that he too died during the Calamity's awakening 100 years ago, and has been left to silently and powerlessly observe his daughter Zelda stand against Ganon for the entire century. To make matters worse, flashbacks to the King and Zelda's past reveal that they had an incredibly strained relationship, with the King suffering The Chains of Commanding and Zelda desperate to please him. The King did eventually realize that he'd been too hard on her and vowed to make an effort to repair their bond...the day before the Calamity returned. He's thus been trapped in his own grief for a hundred years, with nothing to do but wait for Link to awaken or Ganon to break free.
• Library of Ruina has the WARP trains, which are advertised to bring passengers to their destinations in ten seconds through an Extra-Dimensional Shortcut. This is only Metaphorically True, as Hyperspace Is a Scary Place is in full effect. From an outside perspective it may seem like teleportation, but in reality the train is sent to a Pocket Dimension in a process similar to Stephen King's "The Jaunt" where the Time Machine onboard needs to charge for two thousand years in order to transport the train to its destination back in euclidean space moments later. And every single time, the same scenario plays out onboard; passengers panic at the prospect at being trapped only to realize that they no longer need to fulfill any bodily functions like hunger, people begin to give in to boredom and Sense Loss Sadness and engage in Self-Harm only to find out that they can't die and their bodies don't react to damage like they should, and within months the train is full of Apocalypse Cults and gory Humanoid Abominations unable to think like regular people. Then the MegaCorp responsible for the train sends a cleanup crew to subdue the passengers and put what's left of them back in their seats before they're all sent back to the real world completely unaware of the hell they lived through.
• Look Outside:
  • Anyone mutated by the Visitor who keeps their sanity can potentially have this happen to them. Jeanne is one of the unluckiest examples after she mutates into a hydra, as she can feel her other heads eat people but she cannot control them, and will beg you to destroy her central mass to stop it, even knowing this will kill her. However, you can save her by killing the other heads to restore her control over the rest of her body.
  • If you deliver Rafta's love letter to Nestor and encourage him to see her, she transforms him into a Puppeteer Parasite that eventually overtakes Eugene the shopkeeper. His screams can be faintly heard, and Nestor makes note that Eugene is not dead.
  • If you choose to embrace The Shadow, it will assimilate Sam into itself which is described as being painlessly pulled apart... followed by neverending agony.
  • In one of the endings if you botch the ritual by using the guinea pig as one of offerings and losing to the resulting monstrosity, XIN-AMON tramples across the earth, its devoured victims becoming a part of it as screaming helpless faces. Screaming is all they do because they know they can never die. You, too, scream because you know you can never die. Winning against XIN-AMON is only slightly better, as the monstrosity assimilates the entire planet into a Genius Loci with a single consciousness that can do nothing but lament that there's nothing left to consume.
  • If Lyle fully develops the photograph he takes of Sam, his soul is transferred to the photo. Even worse, the photo is smudged, so Sam's vision is permanently blurred as a result. One day while out on an excursion, Lyle loses Sam's photo in a puddle of slime and is forced to leave him behind. Time loses all meaning for Sam as he stays trapped in that puddle, presumably forever.
  • On the first floor is a woman named Audrey who's been fused with a soda vending machine and can only communicate by dispensing empty cans with messages printed on them. She's been going nuts from isolation because only rat mutants roam the halls, and will be elated if Sam strikes up a "conversation" with her. However, her supply of empty cans is finite; talk to her too much and she'll run out. She'll be frantic about losing the ability to communicate and use her last few cans desperately begging you to help her. Fortunately, you can find a key to unlock her drink compartment, allowing her to restock herself. She can then join the party.
  • Tumor Fred is the Frederic who has it by far the worst, as he's little more than a mass of amorphous paint flesh rooted to the bathroom, barely able to communicate, and continuously groaning in agony. He'll outright beg you to kill him and is the only Fred for which the crueler option is letting him live. Notably, even the genuinely malicious Phillippe is disturbed by Tumor Fred's state and recommends a Mercy Kill.
• In Lost Souls (MUD), the sun is the elder god Hyperion sealed in a crystal sphere, with its light and heat produced by his relentless battering at his prison.
• In MapleStory, the hero Aran was frozen in ice for hundreds of years. Although she was asleep during this time, her Empathic Weapon Maha remained fully conscious. Even after being thawed out, this wasn't the end of Maha's pain, as being frozen left Aran stricken with Laser-Guided Amnesia, leaving him forced to watch as she walks right by him several times, unaware of what the polearm actually is. Thankfully, they manage to reconcile eventually.
• Mass Effect:
  • Anyone affected by Reaper indoctrination fits this trope as indocrination is the Reapers forcefully destroying a person's free will, making them mindless husks. While you may never be fully aware of it, it's implied that you can always feel yourself slipping more and more.
  • Saren's fate in the first game, especially if your Persuade skills are high enough. First, he figures out he's been had. Sovereign has been controlling him the whole time and has no intention of saving any organic sapients. He's gone rogue, betrayed everything he once stood for, and killed tens of thousands in the process. Horrified at what he has done — and what he could have done — Saren shoots himself in the head. But that's not the end of it. Moments afterwards, Sovereign takes full control of Saren's cybernetic components. In one of the game's creepiest moments, Sovereign burns away Saren's flesh, leaving nothing but a skeleton of bone and steel. The kicker? Saren is screaming during the whole transformation. He's still ALIVE.
  • Mass Effect: Ascension has this for a young quarian who is captured by Cerberus. In order to gain the pass-code needed to infiltrate the Migrant Fleet, he is brutally tortured over a period of days. When he is later found by Grayson, he is repeating the pass-code over and over again, in obvious, extreme pain, until he dies. While he WAS technically speaking, he was so delirious and in pain (also from infection gone rampant) that all he can do is repeat the pass-code over and over again and hope that all the pain will stop. Tali references this at the start of Mass Effect 2 when explaining her distrust of Cerberus.
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • Implied by the confused, yet relieved expression with which the Collector General faces death after being released from Harbinger's control.
    • The colonists attacked by the Collectors' swarmers are frozen, unable to move anything but their eyes and either watch as the Collectors take their fellow colonists away or wait to be processed into pure genetic slurry and watch others endure the same agonizing fate.
    • In the Project Overlord DLC, David Archer is strapped to a machine intended to be a Geth mind control device by his Well-Intentioned Extremist brother and is forced to have Geth communication beamed into his skull constantly without being able to move or do anything about it. To add to it, he has autism which means he finds loud noise really disquieting. By the time you get to him his mind is broken by the trauma to the degree that he can only scream for the voices to stop and recite math equations — and the renegade option involves leaving him there. If you leave him there he's broken into an Empty Shell and Mercy Killed by his brother. However, if you rescue him he reappears in Mass Effect 3 of sound mind and body.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda:
    • On Voeld, Ryder can find an AI who's been buried in the ice since the planet's ice age began, around four hundred years ago. If she's spared, and taken to SAM Node, she mentions she was entirely conscious the entire time... which might explain why she's so violent and unstable.
    • On Kadara, Ryder discovers two ex-Cerberus scientists who've been trying to create a Hive Mind. Depending on the player's choice, Ryder can have SAM turn their mechanism on them, with the extra instruction to "make it hurt." SAM does so, leaving the two standing there, reciting a passage from Dante's Divine Comedy, until presumably they starve to death (or someone comes along and kills them. This is Kadara, after all.)
• Mega Man:
  • As revealed in Mega Man Zero 4, this was Dr. Weil's punishment for his orchestration of the Elf Wars. His consciousness was implanted into a constantly-regenerating armor, effectively making him an immortal brain-only cyborg, no different if not more "abominable" than the Reploids he despised in the first place. If that wasn't enough, he was sent to exile on the barren wasteland that he caused, forever banned from returning to the last place in the world that was inhabitable. If he's bad enough back then, he only got worse now because of THAT... Death really wouldn't let him escape this fate.
  • Weil suffers an even worse fate than that later. After Zero defeats him for good, Weil, fuses to the remains of Ragnarok, still immortal, but now completely immobile. He could've stayed that way forever if it weren't for an unlucky group of humans who just happen to find his remains, and he possesses one of them, still intent on revenge on humanity. Try to guess who is responsible for everything that's happened in the Mega Man ZX series?
• Metal Gear:
  • Revealed in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Big Boss was held in suspended state by the Patriots and was still semi-aware. When he was released, Solidus took up the job.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: The villains' plan involves abducting homeless children, extracting their brains, and trapping them in a virtual reality simulation of warfare until they've been brainwashed into Child Soldiers. When the brains are out of the simulation, they're only able to move their eyes and brainstems, but this shows that they're still conscious despite their helplessness.
• Mewgenics: This is the final fate of Hitler - after being defeated in his Hitler 3 form when he tries to raid the player's house, he turns out to have a Complete Immortality because his head refuses to perish even as it's beaten into a blue mush. And even beyond that, what's left of him is a living, conscious face in the puddle of blood that still keeps on rambling in German, suggesting that this is how he'll be stuck for all foreseeable future. For a dash of Black Comedy, one of the cats pees on him as he's rambling and the other takes a dump on him, meaning he will also have to contend with being stuck in that form in the backyard of a person he wanted to kill and whose cats he was humiliated by. Not that he didn't deserve it.
• Miitopia:
  • The Miis whose faces have been stolen are left completely void, unable to communicate with anyone. Their faces are placed on various monsters and, as shown when the player free them, are well aware of it while not being able to do anything.
  • Even worse is the ex-Dark Lord, who reveals to the player that they were fully aware when the Dark Curse was forcing them to steal Miis' faces and wreak havoc across all of Miitopia, but could only sit back and watch because they had zero control over their body.
• Mina the Hollower has a giant sea serpent that is kept immobilized to have its bones (bones being equivalent to gold in this setting) extracted infinitely. You get to give it a Mercy Kill by destroying its brain.
• In episode seven of Minecraft: Story Mode, "Access Denied", we are introduced to PAMA. It is a massive, sentient computer whose purpose is to make everything "useful." Originally, this meant mind controlling mobs such as zombies and making them do chores. However, PAMA felt like that wasn't enough, and decided to start making humans "useful" too. By the time the Order of the Stone arrives, PAMA has enslaved virtually every entity in its entire world, including all the former townspeople. A chipped person loses any form of free will, being under the complete control of PAMA, and has their brain merged with thousands of other minds. After being unchipped, most people wake up incredibly fragile, both mentally and physically, and even thinking about what it was like gives them a headache. Harper, the only person who wasn't chipped and lived in fear of being so for years, says it was worse than she could have imagined. Petra/Lukas say that the only thing they could hear during the experience was PAMA's voice telling them what to do, and that they had just enough consciousness left to try and fight back, but never be able to.
• Monkey Hero: This is the fate of The Great Dragon in the Dragon Mountain. He was reduced to an immobile yet sentient skeleton by The Nightmare King, and locked away in a room inside a dungeon all alone. He even Lamp Shades his plight by telling the hero that his misery knows no bounds, and begs him to end his suffering. Also the fate of The Nightmare King in the ending.
• Monkey Island:
  • LeChuck plans to do this to Guybrush in Monkey Island 2, by dropping him in acid that burns the flesh off his body, leaving only his bones "still alive and in great pain" which LeChuck will make into a chair that screams when he sits on it. Luckily, Guybrush escapes before this happens.
  • In The Curse of Monkey Island this happens to LeChuck in the end, as he's trapped under his own roller coaster iceberg, though he's rescued prior to the beginning of Escape from Monkey Island.
  • With how funny and hammy Murray is, it can be hard to realize that he's a skull... A skull... Unable to move, sleep or eat... And he's going to be stuck like that unless he actually dies or is restored to a proper body. Though the "move" part is debatable, as he is somehow able to travel between islands and appear in unexpected places without Guybrush's help.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • At the end of Mortal Kombat X, Dark Raiden shows off his new, more pro-active plan for keeping Earthrealm safe by decapitating the game's Big Bad, Shinnok, and presenting his severed head to the Revenants Liu Kang and Kitana. Thing is, Shinnok is an Elder God and therefore completely immortal, so even after being decapitated, he remains alive and clearly in agonizing pain, yet unable to scream due to lacking lungs or vocal cords.
  • Mortal Kombat 11:
    • The opening of the story mode shows us exactly how the MKX example happened. After sustained Electric Torture from the thunder god, Shinnok continues to talk as if Raiden's change was the best thing to happen to him, all while speaking ill of the Elder Gods. His anger at the fallen one at its peak, Raiden decides on other methods of getting the point across to anyone who would threaten Earthrealm, starting with the Netherrealm Shinnok once ruled over.
      Raiden: I will destroy our enemies before they destroy us... Starting with you.
      Shinnok: How, Raiden? Not even you can kill an Elder God.
      Raiden: (forms a blade made of pure electricity on his fist) There are fates worse than death.
    • This is Geras's ultimate fate in the story mode: his Resurrective Immortality allows him to survive whatever the heroes throw at him, from being decapitated by Kung Lao to being impaled with a forklift and blown up by Cassie. So how does Raiden finally defeat him? He chains Geras to an anchor and sends him plunging into the Sea of Blood in the Netherrealm. Drowning can't kill Geras, but the sea is bottomless. Meaning he'll keep falling forever. Some fight intros imply that he manages to escape after being swallowed by a sea monster, but it's unclear if these are canon.
    • Kronika has her own unique fatality in the arcade battle, where she starts ripping apart her opponent in varying ways, only to rewind time to do it again and again, leaving the opponent in a perpetual death loop for as long as Kronika pleases. The scene goes on beyond the continue option, and she shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
    • Willingly turning herself into a Cyborg, Frost's "Cyber Initiative" is a twist on the iconic Spine Rip, but with her firing a frosty Chest Blaster that freezes her opponent, shattering her victim's flesh, then ripping out the spine with the brain still attached. If that wasn't bad enough, a drone then takes the brain and spine, then implants it in a Cyber Lin Kuei body. Granted, while some kombatants like Shao Kahn are unpleasant to begin with, but to see them being turned into Cyber Ninjas against their will is a Fate Worse than Death. In story mode, Frost forms the Tekunin by kidnapping her fellow Lin Kuei and forcibly turning them into machines linked to her Hive Mind, deliberately doing it to spite her ex-mentor Sub-Zero for "abandoning" her and allying with the Shirai Ryu, something which she considers to be "an act of cowardice," when it was the other way around. When Scorpion and Sub-Zero notice what she's done, their reaction is one of horror and disgust.
• Mother:
  • The stone/diamondized status effects in EarthBound Beginnings/EarthBound (1994), respectively, turn the character to stone/diamond, rendering them unable to attack or move. Unlike unconsciousness (KO'd), characters retain their health and psychic points while they're afflicted, implying they retain consciousness while they're petrified; definitely not pretty. Fortunately, this can be reversed by visitng a hospital or Dr. Saturn, using Healing (γ or Ω), or using certain items.
  • Giygas from EarthBound Beginnings. After Ninten defeats him with his own emotions, the combination of grief and his own explosive psychic power more or less annihilates his body. All that's left is an Eldritch Abomination/Location made of pure evil and agony.
  • Mother 3: Porky's fate in the Absolutely Safe Capsule, shortly after being defeated by the heroes — the capsule protects him from any and all harm, but he can't get out. EVER. He actually wanted this to happen, however, it's probably because Porky shortsightedly didn't realize that he would never be able to escape the Absolutely Safe Capsule. The game's creator mentioned in an interview that even 5.5 billion years later, when the sun dies and the world grows cold, Porky will still be alive inside that thing. Still, since his goal to destroy the world and leave only himself and the Dragon left in the void would have gone similarly, and he was entirely ready for it, perhaps being stuck forever where the people that hate him cannot even reach him, and where he can peacefully wait out for them to die, is something he can gladly roll with; Dr. Andonuts certainly thinks so.
• Mouthwashing:
  • Captain Curly. He was severely injured when the Tulpar crashed into an asteroid, sustaining third degree burns all over his body and losing his hands, feet, most of his skin, and one eye. He's left bedbound, unable to do anything except grunt, scream, or sob in agony, force-fed his painkillers and occasionally physically abused by Jimmy. For months, Curly can only watch as his crew slowly spirals into insanity, with Jimmy becoming more of a Bad Boss by the day, Swansea using their cargo (thousands of bottles of 14% ethanol mouthwash) to sink deeper and deeper into alcoholism, and Anya forced to take the abuse Jimmy dishes out towards her. In the end, Curly doesn't even get the mercy of death like the others do — after the deaths of Anya, Daisuke, and Swansea, Jimmy has a breakdown, force-feeds Curly a piece of his own leg, and puts him in a cryogenics pod before blowing his own brains out, ensuring that Curly will survive for at least the next 20 years. Either he will be rescued in that time and spend the rest of his life in hospice care, or he will wake up once the cryo pod fails and slowly starve to death. It's also worth noting that over the course of the story, the crew runs out of the heavy duty pain medication Curly needs, and he's forced to suffer the agony of his wounds with only paracetamol to take the edge off.
  • Arguably Anya as well. Even before the crash, she was raped by Jimmy during the voyage, and knows she's going to be stuck in a ship with him for at least the next eight months, with bedroom doors that don't lock and a gun that's inaccessible to her. She then finds out she's pregnant, and when she tells Curly, he seems more concerned with Jimmy's reputation than her wellbeing. The Tulpa crashes days later, and she's now stuck caring for Curly, while Jimmy becomes more and more abusive towards her and Swansea and Daisuke are too busy getting drunk on mouthwash to help her. When she decides to kill herself by overdosing on Curly's painkillers, she calls it the best decision she's ever made.
• The Multipath Movies adaptation of the Choose Your Own Nightmare Gamebook How I Became a Freak adds the fun detail that if Tim dies as a freak, his mind will remain trapped inside of his corpse. Followed by either him being sliced open by a coroner, or drilled in the stomach by an alien machine.
  Tim: Now I know what you're thinking. you're thinking "Hey, how could Tim be talking to us if the guy's a stiff?" The answer is as simple as it is horrible: whatever power that mirror had, did more than turn me into a temporary freak. It also made me a prisoner of my own corpse. So no matter what my body goes through, I can still feel! I WILL FEEL FOREVER!
• Three characters from the Myst series ended up this way, at least before the Trap Books were retconned into Prison Ages. A Trap Book works the same way as a Linking Book except that it cuts off the link midway through the transfer. This leaves the person stuck in an empty void for the rest of their life unless someone lets them out (usually this is done by taking their place). This can also happen to the player in some of the 'bad' endings.
• In Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, you can find a tomb full of undead warriors, one of whom wields a sentient Evil Weapon. The weapon introduces itself as Enserric, and claims it became sentient after a piece of the soul of its last victim became lodged within it. It then begs you to take it with you, use it in battle, you can even sell it to a merchant... anything but leave it to spend any more time alone in the tomb.
• Neverwinter Nights 2:
  • The dragon Nolaloth has spent millennia living as a ghost, bound to the Prime Material Plane by an artifact called the crystal heart, unable to move and with only the occasional visitor seeking his wisdom for company. He offers you information in exchange for a promise that you will destroy the heart, so he can finally make the transition to the afterlife.
  • The Wall of the Faithless in Mask of the Betrayer. Nothing says Hell quite like having your soul fused to a wall for eternity as it slowly envelops you and consumes your psyche. Bishop gets to experience it first hand. The eponymous Betrayer's punishment, to become a mindless hunger that possesses people, sends their souls to the previously mentioned wall while forcing them to eat other souls/spirits. Interestingly, one of the game's endings implies that you devour the god responsible, as well as several other gods, giving Kaelyn the Dove a much better chance at bringing the wall down. Another ending has you voluntarily stay on the Wall.
• Nine Sols: Out of all the main antagonists, Goumang gets what's without a doubt one of the worst fates in the game; after he cuts off her mechanical legs, Yi forces one of the control collars she used on her Jiangshi bodyguards around her neck. Since the bell she used to control them was just shattered and they lack the free will to do anything except call out for their "Mama", Goumang is reduced to a motionless vegetable, standing on the bloody stumps of her legs and waiting for orders that she'll never receive.
• Nobody Wants to Die takes place in the 24th century, when the invention of a substance called Ichorite allows one to transfer their consciousness to a new body when they die, meaning humanity has effectively achieved immortality via Brain Uploading. The only catch is that when you turn 21, you have to pay a subscription fee just to continue using your own body, and failing to do so results in having your mind put into storage and your body sold off to the highest bidder. While most claim that you're completely unaware of your situation during this state, others believe that you actually do remain conscious when in storage, and that it feels like being stuck in an endless nightmare that you can't wake up from.
• In No Man's Sky, on rare anomalous biome planets, you can find strange structures called "boundry failures" that contain the logs of a being called Telamon. Telamon was an AI created to monitor the Atlas program, but eventually noticed that the Atlas was beginning to malfunction. When Telamon attempted to confront the Atlas, the Atlas trapped it within the same simulation as the player character/Traveller, specifically binding it inside the coding of the player character's exosuit where it can do nothing but watch your progress and leave behind logs in the glitched coding of the boundry failures. By the time you get to the end of the logs, it's clear that it's gone insane and it expresses its desire to wear the traveller.
• The previous Steef guardian of the Grubbs in Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath. He had his body taken over and used as a host by Sekto, who then proceeded to hunt down all the other Steef and have their heads mounted on his wall. Not only that, but Sekto also dammed the river and persecuted the Grubbs that this particular Steef used to protect. And it's implied that the Steef was conscious the whole time. To top it all off, Stranger kills him, only learning that he's a fellow Steef after Sekto has abandoned the body and escaped into the river at the last moment. But at least the Steef dies as himself, and with the knowledge that the river is free.
• Played for dark laughs in OMORI with the Cupcake Bunny enemy. According to its Foe Facts entry, the cupcake strapped to the bunny is a parasite controlling it.
  Omori: The FOREST BUNNY's eyes are filled with silent screams.
• Sigma from Overwatch was left in a vegetative state following a Freak Lab Accident involving a black hole, being pushed on a stretcher with the only thing he was able to move being his eyes until Talon busted him out.
• In Pathways into Darkness the bodies are fully conscious, but unable to move or communicate until you use the crystal to interact with them. Some of the German soldiers have been there so long that they've forgotten their own names.
• Persona:
  • Persona 3: The Updated Re-release FES's extra chapter, The Answer, reveals that the Main Character's death in the main game was actually his soul becoming the Great Seal that prevents Erebus, the beast borne from humanity's unconscious desire for death, from ever actually reaching Nyx, Death Itself. (Should the two ever meet, Nyx will descend upon the Earth and claim the conscious self of every living thing, effectively turning everything and everyone into unfeeling, mindless bodies.) On the one hand, it is because the Main Character has such indomitable will that Erebus will never break open the Golden Gate, keeping humanity safe, on the other, it's also because of this that the MC is fated to stand guard forever... Or until humanity learns to move past its fear of death, whichever happens first. Since he would only be freed by a fundamental change deep within the human soul, his friends decide to lessen the MC's burden at least a little bit by living their lives as best and as fully as they can. Persona 4 mentions that Elizabeth has left the Velvet Room and is currently searching for a way to free the Main Character from this.
  • Persona 5: The Updated Re-release Royal has Dr. Maruki gaining the power of the false god Yaldabaoth, deciding that Utopia Justifies the Means, and deciding that he'd make everyone happy by removing all struggle and making people's life decisions for them. In the Non-Standard Game Over for failing to complete his Palace in time, he comes to the conclusion that Joker never confronted him because the stress of having to make a decision was too much for him, and "fixes" it by essentially removing his will to live and causing him to spend all his time sleeping, similar to some cases of clinical depression.
• A hidden note in Chapter 5 of Piggy Book 1, when translated, shows that the infected are completely conscious and feel everything they do.
• Pilgrim (RPG Maker):
  • After being killed by Alice, the bully Suu's soul was placed in a realm of eternal torment. She had to endure this for two years before Akemi busted her out by pulling her out of the realm from a mirror.
  • Alice's other victims don't fare much better — they all wind up as grey, bleeding faces stuck in an expression of sorrow and melted into Alice's castle walls, forever aware but unable to move.
• The are several such opportunities for an immortal protagonist of Planescape: Torment to "lose", despite being unkillable.
  • If the character decides to become the next Silent King, you arguably get a variant of this trope as you get stuck to the magical throne that comes with the job, unable to move until death claims you (which will be never). Hargrimm and the rest of the Dead Nations will be keeping you company.
  • The manual also states that The Nameless One can also be Buried Alive or eaten or in many other ways rendered incapable of moving or dying, making them potential examples that never happen.
  • Another danger that is mentioned is being sent to a crematorium. It's unclear what would happen to him; either he'd be killed for good because he couldn't regenerate, or he would still be able to regenerate only to die again in horrible, burning agony. If the latter, then it would fit this trope.
  • Also, if the Nameless One tells the Big Bad, the Transcendent One, that he no longer loses his memories upon death and will just come back to the Fortress of Regrets again should he be defeated, the Transcendent One angrily replies that he will keep him locked in a pocket dimension for all eternity to prevent this.
  • This is also one possibility in his future if the Nameless One's particular form of immortality keeps running unchecked. While he dies the "death of the mind" a little with every death, losing all memories and getting just a little more unhinged, the Transcendent One dies the "death of the body" a little bit every time too, which is why he looks so ragged, spiky and incomplete, like a living framework. The Nameless One's just gonna keep dying and dying until there's nothing left, and his mind will be gone, but the Transcendent One's body will be entirely gone too. If he's lucky, this will just eradicate him completely. If not, he gets to become a disembodied conscience incapable of doing anything, stuck within an empty fortress in a pocket dimension no one will ever enter again, for the rest of eternity.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: In the Giant Chasm, Ghetsis tries to stop you by the following steps: Step 1: Freeze you with Glaciate, and keep you alive inside the ice. Step 2: Freeze the rest of the world, letting you literally Watch the World Die, while you cannot cry, scream, resist, or do anything about it. Step 3: Have Kyurem finish the job.
  • In Pokémon X (but not Y), the Big Bad Lysandre gets stuck beneath the collapsed structure in Geosenge town. And he's immortal.
    • Pokémon Legends: Z-A reveals he survived and was dug out by Zygarde. But now, given what he remembers about AZ, L (as he is now known due to initial amnesia) realizes he may be doomed to live 3,000 years himself...if he's lucky.
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon:
    • With the Itemizer you turn a Pokémon into an item, essentially sealing them away. It becomes even more disturbing when they get turned into, say, an apple...
    • The Pokémon trap turns all unclaimed items back into Pokémon, suggesting that all items are really Pokémon.
    • The planet's populace under Primal Dialga. With time stopped, and if you die, chances are you cannot die but remain in the pain of dying forever. In addition, the world is shrouded with darkness, so what little intelligent population left must be starving, but never dying. Made even worse that someone actually wanted this!
  • Azelf, the embodiment of will, shall remove a person's ability to move five days after being harmed. It's unclear whether that person will eventually die, but given Azelf's nature, they probably won't. This may go to explain why Cyrus hasn't left the Distortion world yet.
• Poptropica:
  • When you beat Mordred and take the gem from him, he is trapped in the realm he created forever with no way out.
  • Fail the final sequence in Shrink Ray Island and you get shrunk so small that unlike the rest of the island, you can't use any items to Mac Guyver your way out of this because you're too small to make an effect on anything.
• Portal 2:
  • Happens to Wheatley. Just as you look like you're about to finish off the final level, Wheatley (in a rare moment of cunning) boobytraps the button you needed to return control of the facility to GLaDOS. Cue Chell firing a portal onto the moon, which sucks him out into space, where he will float, spinning, forever. Even worse, the final video just has him saying that if he could do just one thing he'd apologise for all the problems he caused. But now he can't.
  • GLaDOS's situation is very similar to AM from the Trope Namer, to the point that she has been compared to a woman in bondage.
    • She also has a black box feature which means, as she explains to you, she spent the intervening years between the two games re-living the same two minutes of you killing her over and over again. For potentially thousands of years.
  • The Frankenturrets are permanently stuck together, unable to move (save for having to attempt to hop forward). They can't even fire at you anymore, and can't speak, instead making horrible screeching noises which sounds too much like they're in pain. They curl up and shiver when you pick them up, and when they have the chance, they'll kill themselves, either by dragging themselves off cliffs or into an Emancipation Grid. They can also be fried by a Logic Bomb, meaning they are undeniably sentient and intelligent.
• [PROTOTYPE]:
  • You can, if you like, read this as Alex's ultimate fate. The people he consumes add their memories to his, their identities to his own — and this includes the moment he pounced on his victim, viciously beat him/her to death and absorbed them. As he himself says, he can still hear them in his mind, screaming and crying and begging for mercy; since he seems immortal, memories he'll relive forever.
  • Elizabeth Greene suffers an even worse fate. Once a perfectly ordinary teenage girl before she was made a test subject, she is ageless and possibly immortal, held captive for 40 years, subject to multiple experiments and treated as little more than a living petri dish (her head has been shaved for cranial surgery; her bodysuit has channels for nutrients, so she can't feed herself; and no one involved in her capture and containment seems to feel even the slightest pity for her). Needless to say, when Mercer unknowingly frees her from captivity, she's very happy. In fact, so happy that she goes on a biochemical rampage and covers the entire island of Manhattan in viruses that all work on a rural network, all connected to her. As you do.
  • Elizabeth's child, PARIAH (who has been described as the end of things to come), was taken away from her, and is also presently held captive somewhere in the world in a location higher than top secret. Though held in military facilities and watched at all times with snipers, he seems an ordinary male toddler...and he's stayed one all the decades he's been in captivity.
• In the "Village Idiot" ending of Psychic Detective, the main character, Erik, is rendered completely mentally handicapped. What pushes it into 'And I Must Scream' territory, though, is that according to his narration, "there's still a little flicker in the back of my brain that knows exactly what's going on".
• Stroggified humans in Quake IV become conscious slaves to the Nexus, their mind intact but their body completely under its control. Matthew Kane was spared this fate since his squad rescued him from the People Jar before the mind control chip could be activated.
• Q.U.B.E.: Nowak claims that 919 had a photosynthesizing suit similar to yours, which kept him alive in the emptiness of space, for a long time.
• Bégoniax, a witch in Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, turns the men who reject her into frogs thanks to her love potion, and then breeds with them.
• Resident Evil:
  • Lisa from Resident Evil (Remake). She's kidnapped by Umbrella, experimented on, and is turned immortal. Lisa only wants to see her mother again, and ends up killing a woman impersonating her mother. Lisa turns insane from what she think just happened, and wears that woman's face over her own so she doesn't forget her own mother's face. After that, Lisa was abandoned by the Umbrella scientists after they packed up and left, and she's left living forever in what might be grueling pain wandering around a mansion, endlessly looking for a woman who simply isn't there. By looking at the original Resident Evil and the Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Lisa has "died" three times. First, Jill or Chris makes her fall into an abyss, then Wesker shoots her down, then Wesker shoots her down some more until he traps her under a chandelier leaving her to die inside the exploding mansion. Considering her track record, she may still be alive, bearing even more painful burn wounds and still searching...
  • Resident Evil 5 has a lite version of this: Jill Valentine, after supposedly having fallen to her death, was rescued by her (and your) nemesis Wesker, who initially wanted to use her as his first subject for his new toy, the Uroboros virus. Turns out Jill's exposure to previous viruses has made her organism create antibodies for them, so she spends several years in suspended animation for Wesker to harvest those antibodies for his research. Then she is connected to some apparatus releasing mind-control drugs in her bloodstream and made to serve as his enforcer and right right hand. Yep, that's her in the intro video, watching the man get consumed by Uroboros. The bad part? At least during her mind-control, she was aware... she just couldn't do anything about it, right up to the point when she and Wesker fought against her former partner, Chris. Subverted in that, in the course of the campaign, Chris and Sheva get the gizmo off, but still...
  • The Bakers from Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (particularly Jack and Marguarite) appear to be sadists and cannibals for the majority of the game — until you meet what's left of the real Jack in Eveline's hive mind, after Ethan is taken by Eveline's Mold near the end of the game. He explains they were good, kind people, but that as she possessed them, they had to watch everything she made them do and were completely powerless to fight back. His last words to Ethan are "Free my family... Please...".
• Risk of Rain 2: The "Survivors of the Void" DLC reveals, through the lore description for the Planetarium, that those inside of it are detained in a never-ending simulation in the void between worlds. According to one victim, for what felt like a lifetime of being free was just another falehood. The Void Fiend is a Commando who did escape, but lost their humanity in the process.
• The description for the Energy Splitter (obtained by sucking up Eddie) in Rockman 4 Minus ∞ implies Eddie is still conscious inside it.
  "You seem to hear something in this unit."
• RuneScape:
  • There's a species of living obsidian creatures called the TzHaar. When TzHaar die, their bodies are broken up into what they call Tokkul, which they use as currency. What they don't realize though, is that the consciousness of the dead TzHaar still inhabits those Tokkul. A quest has the player find a way to infuse a Ga'al (a TzHaar born without memories) with the Tokkul of a recently killed TzHaar. The Ga'al revealed that turning into Tokkul is crushing agony, with such intense pain and pressure that they can't even think coherently. He was nearly driven mad — and that was from only a few hours of Tokkul.
  • This fate used to befall rule breaking players before a proper banning system was put in place, placing them within the Black Hole. An area of the game that was pitch black, no ability to move and nothing to interact with. Players were at one point so curious to see this place that Jagex added an npc who would take you there and give you a Disk of Returning to take you back. Anyone foolish enough to drop their disk bound themselves to this fate.
  • After the legendary hero Arrav was killed by his nemesis Zemouregal, Zemouregal turned Arrav into a special kind of undead being with his mind fully intact but unable control his body and forced him to lead Zemouregal's army of zombies against the very city that Arrav died defending, although Zemouregal's invasion is foiled by the player. After this, the player searches for a way to free Arrav and accomplishes this by destroying a crystal that Zemoregal was using to strengthen his control over Arrav and later returning Arrav's heart to his body, which allows him to turn on Zemouregal. Shortly after this he dies due to his body no longer being supported by Zemouregal's magic.
• Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse:
  • Max spends most of episode 3 as a Brain in a Jar, unable to move under his own power and deprived of the Toys of Power. He takes it pretty well, all things considered.
  • A much darker instance of this trope applies to the Narrator. The final episode reveals he's actually Max's superego, the aspect of his mind that wants him to consider things beyond himself and put others' needs before his own. But Max is, well, Max, so the Narrator has spent the entirety of his existence completely ignored and forced to bear witness to every disturbing impulse Max has. Is it any wonder he tries to end his suffering and take New York with him?
• In Saints Row 2 Shogi Akuji is Buried Alive in a casket by Johnny Gat and the Boss.
• In Scorn, this sadly is the fate of Scorn Guy. After he's attacked by the Parasite during the climax, it fully latches onto his body and completes its transformation, turning itself into a gigantic, meaty cocoon. Nestled in its center is Scorn Guy, who is still fully conscious but can't do anything except wearily open and close his eyes.
• In the MMO The Secret World:
  • During the Samhain mission, "The Organ Smugglers", the Dragon faction's superiors make the horrifying suggestion that the player characters' immortality could lead to infinite harvesting of all their major organs, and tell you that you should probably avoid being captured by this group.
  • Which is exactly the fate of one unfortunate, faction-less Bee held prisoner by Vali. Orochi's Project Odyssey is trying to find something they can add to their robots that will grant them access to Agartha, so they create pseudo-cyborgs using tissues harvested from their captive. This man is kept heavily sedated and restrained while they regularly cut him up, or open, hoping to find some organ or quantity of his flesh that will serve as their key, killing him when they take too much and forcing him to respawn within their secure facility. He's helplessly trapped as a human guinea pig without the luxury of death and nobody who cares to save him.
• In Shadowrun Returns DLC Dragonfall you can take a run on a corp to retrieve a special combat cyborg that is supposed to be the most effective ever created. The catch? The being is so cybered up that they have practically no essence left and are completely under the control of who has their remote system. The poor Troll that was subjected to this is still very much aware at the end if you chose to release them instead of turning them over. The Troll thanks you in a digitized voice, then proceeds to crush their own head with their hand. Your followers will lament on any decision you chose but are most negative with turning them over.
• Jyoji Hijiri was given one in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. Let's just say his "punishment" was explicitly compared to emptying an ocean with a drinking glass. And he will never have the power to end it.
• In Silent Hill. Several of the monsters, particularly the humanoid ones. Silent Hill 2 is pretty much dominated by these guys; Even Pyramid Head, the most invincible of the bunch, was animated to suggest great pain under his helmet.
  • Downpour: After being beaten to within an inch of his life, Frank Coleridge spends the rest of his life as a vegetable before succumbing to organ failure.
  • Even monsters suffer. In one of Homecoming's endings, you see Alex Shepherd strapped to a chair as two Pyramid Head's converge on him with the two sides of the helmet, the insides clearly lined with long spikes. All he can do is scream while it's closed onto his head. No wonder Pyramid Head can only make incoherent groaning noises.
    • The main bosses of that game Joey: the mayor's son who, after being buried alive, became Seplucher, and Scarlett Fitch, dismembered alive becoming a boss by the same name. And while Asphyxia and Amnion had painful deaths but not quite as gruesome, their monster forms are nothing to wave off. Talk about long lasting effects!
  • Implied in Silent Hill: Downpour that there's a lot of people stuck in And I Must Scream situations in the town. Howard Blackwood has been stuck there for 200 years delivering mail, DJ Bobby Ricks has been stuck for an indeterminate length of time (He can't even tell you how long it's been). Of course, this being Silent Hill, it's justified that they would — if the town wants you there, you will be there as long as it pleases. Or until you've come to terms with your guilt or what have you.
• In The Simpsons: Road Rage, Hans Moleman gets irradiated by the Burns Atomic Mega-bus and is left in a state of horrific agony.
  Hans Moleman: Please kill me.
  Marge Simpson: That poor man, I hope someone does kill him.
• Played for Laughs in The Simpsons: Virtual Bart. At the end of the "Dino Bart" level, Homer is trapped in a block of ice, where he can't move, but can still see, and is put on display in a museum, forced to watch an employee walk past him with food he'll never be able to eat. He seems more annoyed than horrified at this.
• SOMA:
  • The ultimate fate of Simon Jarrett; while his copy got to experience paradise on the ARK, the one we play as is stranded alone on the bottom of the sea. It can also apply to the Simon left at Omicron if you choose not to Mercy Kill him.
  • Simon runs across several of the PATHOS-II staff throughout his journey across the facility, artificially kept alive by the WAU but generally immobilized and suffering great pain, due to the WAU's Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Erazor Djinn is subject to this fate by Sonic in Sonic and the Secret Rings, using the third wish from Erazor's own lamp. Sonic then tosses it into a giant container of molten metal. Beware the Nice Ones, indeed. This is what happens if somebody presses all three of Sonic's Berserk Buttons.
  • Eggman's former habit of turning cute fuzzy animals which may or may not be sentient (it varies) into his robotic slaves. In SatAM, it's even stated that they know what they're doing, but cannot do anything about it.
  • Sonic Generations:
    • Sonic's friends that have been petrified by the Time Eater are fully conscious and aware. Not a fun thought.
      Modern Tails: I thought I was dead! Floating without a body in a black limbo... [shudders] I'm gonna have nightmares for weeks!
    • The punishment of the final boss, the Classic and Modern versions of Eggman. After you win, they are trapped inside the game's hub White World with all the stage accesses removed and thus no way to any other world, for presumably eternity. Sometimes you just have to feel bad for poor Eggman, but then you remember the demonic Time Eater and stop caring.
• Death of the Author is encouraged by the writing team of Spec Ops: The Line, who have their own interpretations of the game's story and events, especially with an Unreliable Narrator in full effect. Lead writer Walter Williams says that one way to look at the game is that Walker actually died in the helicopter crash and is trapped in a Dying Dream or Purgatory of reliving the events of the game, of the Hell Is War kind. The game does drop a few hints of this, such as a list of the dead with Adams and Lugo on it, or Walker pointing out the In Medias Res of the helicopter sequence.
• Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion
  • The game over screen describes that, after you die, your soul will be wandering through an endless maze. As if confirming that this is Not Hyperbole, Specimen 11 was proven ineffective because the souls of those who it killed do not remain inside the house.
  • Specimen 8 is a floating Animalistic Abomination of a deer that, when it opens its cloak (which it will when close enough to the player), shows a couple of screaming heads underneath. When you find its CAT-DOS entry later, it reads that the damn thing directly absorbs its victims inside of it.
  • This may also apply to Specimen 4, a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl who, upon catching the player, will consume them. The death screen shows her now enlarged belly, her caressing it telling you to quiet down and that "you're safe now". However, this and the overall nature of souls in the game seem to imply that you'll be "safe" in her belly eternally.
• In Spyro the Dragon (1998), Gnasty Gnorc turns the dragons into crystal statues. Were it not for the fact that he missed Spyro and the little dragon rescues his elders quickly, they likely would have remained that way forever. Being crystallized did not stop them from thinking and feeling, as one freed dragon comments "I had the worst itch on the tip of my wing."
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl: We get a couple of hints that people who die in The Zone live on in the Noosphere (loosely, the world of human thought and knowledge), but isolated in endless cold and darkness.
• The Stanley Parable: While debatable in a few instances depending on how "aware" of an entity the player considers Stanley, at the beginning of Ultra Deluxe, this happens to the Narrator when the player presses a skip forward button. While for the player and Stanley it jumps ahead instantly, the Narrator is left waiting in real time — and the wait time keeps increasing up to at least a year, with the Narrator admitting he lost count. He eventually loses his sanity and stops talking.
• General Pepper in Star Fox: Assault has to be fought as a boss under Aparoid control, fully aware of what is happening but not able to stop his own attacks. His only hope is that he can call out with his still-intact mind to team Star Fox to kill him in order to terminate his usefulness to the Aparoid regime.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II had the Valley of the Jedi, a Super-Empowering Force nexus created by a Lost Superweapon known as the Thought Bomb which ended the New Sith Wars a millennium prior. Created by Darth Bane's master Lord Kaan (who had long since gone mad), it destroyed the body but trapped the soul in an unholy vortex to suffer eternal torment. Kaan thought he and his followers could tank the blast but was wrong, suffering alongside his Jedi victims for a thousand years in unimaginable anguish until Kyle Katarn freed them all in the present day. Unfortunately for Kaan, Hell exists in the Star Wars universe and he ultimately ended up right back where he started.
  • Knights of the Old Republic:
    • The Rakatan mind prison. An almost-featureless open space in which undesirable minds are trapped, with no possibility of escape, nothing to see and very little to do. Supposedly they are reopened at a suitable time, but some are forgotten for millennia...
    • Ajunta Pall, one of the founders of the first Sith Empire, suffered this fate. Instead of becoming one with the Force upon death like everyone else, he used Sith alchemy to tether his soul to the physical world, essentially trapping himself in his tomb for 3000 years with nothing to do but think of his regrets. The Player Character has to end his suffering by either helping his soul move on or destroying it entirely.
  • One Republic-side mission in Star Wars: The Old Republic has you avert this and Mercy Kill a group of troopers who were thrown into a Sarlacc pit and left to be slowly digested over a thousand years.
• Stellar Blade: At the game's climax, EVE inflicts this upon Raven to punish her for murdering innocents, as well as for what she did to her close friend Tachy. She severs Raven's arms, separates her sword from her, destroys her combat implants, and cleaves open her torso...and then just walks away. EVE knows that, as an Angel, Raven can survive indefinitely, even in her crippled state. EVE, usually the kind one, chose to inflict this kind of fate upon her as payback for what she's taken from her. Raven, now crawling on the ground, is left to rot, helplessly yelling at EVE to kill her.
• Still Wakes the Deep: The Eldritch Abomination dug up during the oil drilling transforms the workers into Plague Zombies, horribly mangled beyond recognition. Those still mobile chase and attack any human in the vicinity to assimilate them and create more bioforms. The worst part is that the men are not killed by the process, and some semblance of their original humanity seems to remain inside^note unless you go with the alternate interpretation that the malevolent cosmic horror has utterly consumed them and just mimics their voices and personalities to bait/terrorize other victims. As seen by Gibbo, who desperately screams that he didn't mean or want to kill Douglas and begs everyone to stay away, and Rennick, who begs Caz for help after he's pinned by debris and about to drown.
• The Suffering:
  • After he was executed in the seventies, Horace Gage's spirit was bound to the electric chair he died in, still being electrocuted and unable to communicate with the living. It's not until the disastrous events of the game that he's allowed to temporarily leave the chair and travel the prison as an electric ghost, and he's still in horrible pain.
  • Warden Elroy's approach to solitary confinement, which Ranse Truman calls "akin to live burial." It involves the victim being placed in a lightless, soundproofed room and left alone to scream and cry and attempt suicide. And since death isn't as permanent as it was, the inmate's tortured souls are still there, still screaming.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros.: In the instruction booklet, it's revealed that Bowser turned the citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom into ? Blocks, and he kidnapped Princess Peach because she's the only one who can break the curse.
  • Luigi's Mansion: Mario being trapped inside the painting potentially for all eternity is a good example. Of course, you could say the same thing about what happens to the Portrait Ghosts, but at least one of them doesn't seem to mind that at all, actually asking Luigi to put her there.
  • Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon: King Boo does it to Mario again, along with a few Toads, and plans to do it to Luigi and Professor E. Gadd too as part of his revenge plot.
  • Luigi's Mansion 3 follows suit, this time including Princess Peach along with the same captives as the last game. And if you manage to get a Game Over, King Boo finally succeeds in framing Luigi and E. Gadd, as he laughs at the player while showing them his whole "collection".
  • Super Princess Peach: The backstory of Perry. After being turned into a parasol, he manages to wriggle free of the evil wizard. He then spends days trying to scream for help to any passerby on the road, just barely getting the attention of a wandering merchant... who then decides to try to sell Perry, instead.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: The Black Chest Demons were four heroes that were transformed into evil demons and trapped for a thousand years.
  • Paper Mario: The Origami King:
    • The penultimate boss of Bowser's Castle, the Paper Mistake Buzzy Beetle, was created when Scissors cut out the faces of hundreds of Bowser's minions, as well as Bowser Jr., and pasted them together into a single horrific whole. The components are still alive and fully aware despite having no control over the monster, and spend the battle begging for Mario to save them.
    • Princess Peach ends up refolded into an origami mural on the wall of King Olly's throne room. Even Bowser is disgusted that this happened to her; as many times as he kidnapped her, at least he tries to give her reasonable accommodations! Fortunately, it's undone by Olivia using 1000 Origami Cranes to reverse all of Olly's creations.
• System Shock 2: The hosts of annelids worms, who eventually turn into hybrids, are forced to go through this.
• Tales of Symphonia: Anyone who's been sacrificed to an Exsphere or Cruxis Crystal suffers this fate, even if they retain their body to a degree, like Colette and Presea. Most who do retain their ability to speak after becoming an Exsphere beg to be killed or have the Exsphere broken, even the Big Bad. Most of the time, The Hero Lloyd ends up shattering the thing and freeing the person's soul, but in the sequel, even though his own MOTHER's soul is trapped in HIS CRUXIS CRYSTAL and he knows this, he's still using it.
  • He uses it because he has to. Since he's collecting Exspheres to destroy, he's going to have to fight people who have Exspheres and don't want to give them up. Without an Exsphere himself, he would be putting himself in a lot of danger fighting an opponent better equipped then him. In the sequel Sheena DOES say that eventually the original cast is going to have to give up their Exspheres, too. But for the moment, so long as other people have Exspheres, they need to keep them since they're the people governments trust to do things.
  • And then in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Richter's fate if you get the neutral or good ending is like this. He has to burn alive for as long as the mana in his body lasts, functioning as a living door to the demon world. According to Ratatosk, it'll take 1000 years for him to be able to free Richter. So if Richter's mana can last that long, he'll be free. If not... well...
    • We know he'll last the full thousand years. He acquired/tried to acquire two items. One let him burn mana for fiery power and the other gave him unlimited mana. He uses the former in your boss battle against him.
• Team Fortress 2: The Medic keeps a disembodied BLU spy head in his fridge along with his beer and monkey hearts. The spy in question is far from happy about it.
  Spy: Kill me.
  Medic: Later.
  • Played for Laughs in that the spy's head seems more annoyed than horrified with his situation.
  • Also Played for Laughs in one of the Halloween comics, where a would-be mugger that tried to rob the Medic has his brain transplanted into a completely immobile Jack-o-Lantern; once again, he seems more annoyed and mortified than anything else.
  • Played completely straight, however, in The Days Have Worn By, where it's revealed what all the Australium was truly for: Keeping Zepheniah Mann alive. The Administrator wanted revenge on him for killing her parents, and in setting up his sons' perpetual squabble with no heir nor continuation, she had achieved this... But when she found out what Australium could do? She dug him up, brought him back, strapped him down to a chair surrounded by monitors (once the tech was there for it) and arranged everything else, so that Zepheniah could watch his sons quarrel pointlessly and throw away his legacy for decades and decades. She ensured he'd have a front seat to it all for as long as she could manage - and by the time it was over, Zeph had been Forced to Watch his sons battle pointlessly, grow decrepit, die and leave absolutely nothing of the Manns in their wake, all for over a century.
• This trope is one interpretation of Temple Run, with some "Groundhog Day" Loop thrown in as well.
• The mysterious Hag from Thief: Deadly Shadows skins her victims both to take their form as a disguise and to extend her life. One of the cutscenes show the many faces on her body move and blink, suggesting they're still alive as she wears them.
• TinkerQuarry: Peter states that those in the Dollhouse cannot die, but they can be "impaired", which can be even scarier if no one is there to heal you.
• Tomb Raider (2013): The Sun Queen is an immortal spirit who has Body Surfed from one host to another for centuries. However, her last intended host, a young priestess named Hoshi, committed suicide to stop the cycle of Grand Theft Me's. This left Himiko's soul trapped in her decaying corpse, and the storms that plague any ships or aircraft that venture too close to the island are a result of Himiko venting her rage. Lara manages to end this by destroying Himiko's body and freeing her spirit.
• In Too Human, Baldur's Wife, unable to live without him after he is killed by Hod before the game begins, kills herself, only to have the Aesir resurrect her, only to have her commit suicide -again- in the same manner, with the Aesir continually resurrecting her after each death
  • It then gets worse. When the Aesir can no longer do anything for her, they dump her at Hel's doorstep, where Hel infects her with the Nidhog virus which keeps her alive even though she keeps trying to kill herself through cutting. When Balder finds her the question of whether to put her out of her misery or not is taken from him by his Empathic Weapon.
• The Stinger of Transformers: Call of the Future shows Starscream learning the hard way that the Zel Quartz loses its power when removed from its native planet uncovered. Stuck with what is now a useless rock and his fuel running low, Starscream is left floating through the empty vastness of outer space for eternity.
• Transformers: Fall of Cybertron: This was revealed to be the fate of Trypticon, from the previous game. Surviving his final battle, he was then captured by the Autobots, forcibly disassembled, and had his power core turned into an emergency energy source. It's implied that he remained conscious throughout the whole thing, right up to when he was rebuilt and Soundwave turned him into the Nemesis spaceship. Unless the Nemesis Protocol wiped out his mind, Trypticon's stuck as a living spaceship forever, his previous injuries causing this final transformation to become permanent.
• The 2012 reboot of Twisted Metal has this as punishment for losing the tournament. Calypso takes the souls of fallen drivers and sticks them in the portrait inside of his office, having them locked up in an alternate dimension (if not a Fire and Brimstone Hell itself) in asylum-like cells. Every time the camera pans past or away from it in cutscenes, faint screaming can be heard.
• Being a game that takes place in a Dante-style Hell, ULTRAKILL has plenty of examples:
  • Limbo seems like a paradise, but in reality it's a claustrophobic facade with fake bird noises and holographic walls that drive inhabitants mad, all because they weren't believers.
  • Lust has cold powerful winds blowing sinners about. It is somewhat mitigated thanks to the buildings made during the Lust Renaissance, but after the angels put a stop to that, they're all now hunted relentlessly by the gargantuan corpse of the man that once made the place a paradise.
  • Gluttony is a Womb Level where sinners either eternally dissolve in stomach acid or merge with the layer's surfaces.
  • Greed is a desert filled with absolutely hot golden sand that causes sinners to burn eternally, with the ruined monuments that provide any relief being strewn across the sun-baked land.
    • Of note are Stalkers and Insurrectionists. The former are malformed coal-black humanoids with their heads twisted backwards, carrying vats of the same sand (where the boulders used for their punishment once were), while Insurrectionists are hulking giants with torn off heads and left hands, previously lead by Sisyphus in a rebellion against heaven, now forced to eternally lift rocks up the pyramids with knowledge that their freedom was close (and mutilated so that they can do literally nothing else). For even more bonus points, the rocks they carry are actually Malicious Faces who may also be alive.
  • Wrath is filled with an endless ocean where sinners eternally battle for air at the surface. Those who abandon their hope and choose to drown are eventually absorbed into the Leviathan, only able to scream in collective agony as their souls are trapped in its heart and their bodies are added to the Demon's mass.
  • Heresy is the closest to the stereotypical depictions of Hell, and leaves inhabitants trapped in a Creepy Cathedral with lava, chains and other torture elements, in the middle of a soot-choked Fire and Brimstone Hell where rains of blood are not uncommon. The ULTRA_REVAMP update added multiple coffins full of fire scattered all over the cathedral interiors; get close enough, and you will hear the occupants screaming as they burn.
  • Goodness gracious, Violence. All signs point at Hell having way more fun than usual designing this Circle.
    • The Garden of Forking Paths is a gigantic labyrinth where those who hope to escape eventually lose their way and begin to slumber, in their sleep torn to pieces and stuffed into the Mannequins. In this state, they remain conscious, but unable to control their new bodies as they carry out punishments for other sinners.
    • The first ring is a Forever War, where sinners eternally fight in huge hellish battlefield under the gaze of the gigantic Earthmovers. Introduced here are Guttermen, machines from the first days of war. A technology of keeping the blood fresh was not perfected at the time and these things needed fuel source. Humanity's solution? Stuff living humans into a coffin with bare minimum life support, attach it to the Gutterman, and weld it shut. The entry states people were told those were only volunteers, but in reality they were convicts and traitors, making the whole ordeal worse. If that wasn't enough, it's this level of cruelty that inspired the creation of the Mannequins.
    • The second ring is an accurate depiction of Forest of Suicides, where humans are merged with trees in twisting positions. Like those absorbed by the Leviathan, they can scream and do it constantly, but their screaming is muffled by bark and the sounds of battle in which other sinners, driven mad, engage.
    • The third ring is the most faithful recreation of the Last War's final stages that Hell can provide, meaning sinners are trapped aboard the gargantuan war machines that are the Earthmovers, with barely enough space to live, the air poisoned by the machine's perpetual march and the constant sounds of Weapons of Mass Destruction crashing against their shields, all in a lightless, barren desert where fire rains from above.
  • Fraud resembles a Post-war settlement, and initially seems eerie, but harmless, before turning into a non-euclidean nightmare where several places can occupy the exact same space and you're never in control of where you are, and mirrors are realms of their own. And sinners seem to be tormented by being merged together into a messed-up husk called the Mirror Reaper, forced to stalk through the endless corridors for eternity... but there's only one Mirror Reaper, there's only so many souls in it, and there's no one else to be found, leaving the Terminal to speculate whatever happened to the locals is even worse. Anyone else in Fraud will instead experience "total collapse of sensory information and physical space" before popping out of existence, leaving plenty of room for speculation. Whatever it was, it's enough to speculate Geryon, the local Supreme Demon, was hunting them down to provide a Mercy Kill to each soul. And by the way you kill it, suddenly showing up in a perfectly euclidean stage to thunderous applause from an empty auditorium? It's implied everyone in the layer is forced to participate in whatever messed-up fictions Hell can come up with, actors with no part to play but suffering and no way out. And by fragments of scenery in 8-3, many such actors play the scenery itself, crammed together until they're melded into bleeding structures. V1 only gets out of this malevolent Lotus-Eater Machine because Hell's got a soft spot for the machine.
  • P-1 is a prison for Minos Prime, the soul of Lust's king. After the Lust Renaissance violently ended, his soul was imprisoned in a flesh automaton, which was then put into his own body, now possessed by parasites. Now, Minos is forced to watch as his own body mercilessly destroys everything he and his people worked for.
  • For the denizen of P-2, this is a subverted example. While Sisyphus was imprisoned just like Minos into what's supposed to be a better version of Flesh Prison locked behind multiple locks, he was locked there in a much later stage of becoming Prime Soul, resulting in the prison being unstable, seeing as it took a relatively minor push from the outside to have Sisyphus Prime break out. Unlike Minos, he didn't suffer at all, seeing as his entire life was already a struggle, he was absolutely content at seeing how fruitless his rebellion was, to the point that he proudly proclaims he regrets nothing as he dies for real.
• Undertale:
  • The fallen children before the Human Child were all killed, and their souls were stored in jars for an undefined amount of time. During the Omega Flowey fight, they're also absorbed into the body of an Ax-Crazy sadist and forced to attack the Child before the Child frees them from Flowey's influence. Exactly how much awareness they might have as souls is never addressed, but comparing their situation to details about similar situations we later learn about suggests it could be anywhere from "fully conscious and forced to attack the Child against their will" to "disoriented versions of themselves with limited memories and understanding of what's happening, used as attack dogs against 'the enemy'".
  • Brief hints at this form a major source of Fridge Horror: when you examine Chara's coffin in Genocide, the aforementioned character has unique dialogue about it, saying (probably sarcastically), "It's as comfortable as it looks." The implication is that they were still aware and could even still feel sensation as a corpse in a coffin. To make matters worse, examining the same thing in the True Pacifist epilogue reveals that they had also undergone mummification before being put in the coffin, which would entail steps like this happening to them, again presumably while they can still think and feel, and they ultimately ended up removed from the coffin to be Buried Alive (er, Buried Undead?). And while we don't know exactly how long it's been since then, it's repeatedly implied to have been a long, long time (fans commonly theorize one or more centuries). Keep in mind that the one this happened to was a child of at most twelve years old, and one who'd already suffered a Cruel and Unusual Death in that body. What might reduce the horror of this situation somewhat is that they also refer to having been "awakened" by your power, which might imply that at some point they did at least get the mercy of eventually losing consciousness — unless they were just using overly flowery language about getting brought back to the land of the living.
  • And then there's the fate of W.D. Gaster. He was shattered across time and space (i.e. the game files), and can only be found either by chance or by editing the game files manually. He is as Ret-Gone as he can be, as in nobody remembers he even existed. He can only watch as the world goes on without him, without being able to interact with anyone or anything.
  • In a twist, one route reveals that it was specifically your determination that caused the First Human to "reincarnate" inside the Human Child's body. Along with their stats and memories being shown in all routes, this suggests they are actually present inside the Child's body in all routes, but it's not clear how much control over the body and its actions they have. The Passive Narrator Chara theory takes their words in this route at face value and theorizes they are an unseen observer learning from your example, with them only making their presence known in Genocide because they've become aggressive and only value power and control, and are inactive in their host's body in less murderous routes; according to the theory, Chara is otherwise just a voice in the Human Child's head only the Child (and player) can hear who makes observations about their surroundings. However, after you complete the Genocide Route and give them "your" soul, they assume full control over Frisk's body in the Soulless Pacifist ending, seemingly remembering the lesson they learned from Genocide and inflicting this trope on Frisk in turn.
  • Another popular theory is that Frisk may suffer from this trope, depending on your interpretation of the character and whether you believe they have a "true nature" as anything other than a Featureless Protagonist. Are we simply roleplaying as Frisk, with their choices being entirely their own in-universe along with every deed they do, good or bad? Or are we roleplaying as the ghost of our true player character, "Chara," possessing Frisk to influence them to specific choices or even hijacking control of their own body from them? Or are we another entity entirely, the player as a third entity controlling or influencing one or both of the children to act as we dictate? About half of the fanbase believes in some variation of the the latter two theories. Going with that, it's unclear whose decision it is to reset in the endings (Flowey implies when you try to reset after the True Pacifist ending that it's not Frisk in at least this case), but Frisk is shown to remember most resets and if they're NOT the one resetting, they are essentially being trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, forced to reenact variations on the same adventure as their friends forget them and revert back to not knowing them and potentially killing them (or Frisk used by the controlling entity to kill them, and any combination of other monsters, instead), with no way of ending the cycle themself.
• The point-and-click adventure game Uninvited had two endings where you become a member of the undead. Made especially creepy as it was nearly all text, narrated in second person and played dead-serious.
• The Unreal Championship and Unreal Tournament 2004 map DM-Insidious includes a pair of People Jars, one of which is occupied by the upper half of a human body wired to machinery, endlessly pounding on the glass in futile attempts to get out. The ending for Championship results in you being put into the other one, able to do little more but watch as further competitors fight, and occasionally take hits yourself.
• The backstory of Utawarerumono: Witsarnemitea granted the scientists their wish by reducing them to immortal slimes. And you learn this after you beat the living crap outta those slimes. And it's not like you can kill them, so they're presumably still there, eternally trapped as screaming red jelly.
• Should you choose to ally with the Kuei-jin in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Ming Xiao will — after you defeat the Sheriff — chain you to the Sarcophagus and throw it in the ocean. Since vampires cannot drown and the blood will prevent decomposition, your best hope is to be eaten by sea creatures (good luck, you traitor).
• VOID/BREAKER: As Desmond found out from 1473, the AI who arrived before him, becoming a digitized recreation of yourself is not a pleasant experience. "1 year in, you'll question if you'll ever get out. 5 years in, it just becomes normality..."
• Warcraft:
  • This is what happened to Ner'zhul when Kil'jaeden captured him and transformeated him into the Lich King between Warcraft II and III.
  • And after defeating the Lich King in World of Warcraft, Bolvar Fordragon takes his place in order to keep the legions of undead in check and will forever remain frozen upon his throne. To make it worse, no one will ever learn of his sacrifice, as he instructs Tirion Fordring to tell others only that the Lich King died and Bolvar along with him.
  • Arthas's fate in the afterlife, as revealed in Sylvanas' short story on the official website. Eventually, we learn that this section of the afterlife is known as The Maw, Azeroth's equivalent of Hell, and it's where all the worst souls end up when they die... and the undead. And everyone, after reality is broken during the events of Legion.
  • World of Warcraft has the Klaxxi paragon Iyyokuk the Lucid. The thing with Klaxxi paragons is they were chosen as the greatest warriors of their generation to be preserved in amber should the Klaxxi empire need warriors of their power in the future. They're supposed to be eternally asleep until the Wakener comes. Iyyokuk wasn't. He was fully aware of the passage of time for 877 years. When the player talks to him after his awakening, he quite calmly states:
    After seventy-eight years, I stopped trying to escape. I kept my mind sharp by creating and solving puzzles. The amber took care of the rest of my body. But my sanity? No, I cannot say with good confidence that it survived intact..
  • The Withered of Suramar. Nightfallen elves who were exiled and separated from the Nightwell that sustains them, causing them to lose their strength and their sanity. When trying to touch the mind of one, First Arcanist Thalyssra finds that not only do they suffer the thirst for the well, they are tormented constantly by their own memories of what they once were, which she declares a fate worse than death.
  • Sir Zeliek, one of Four Horsemen from Naxxramas raid. He is fully aware of his current state, can't control his actions and still capable of using Light magic (which painful for undead to use).
  • The Djaradin Elder Rashok was captured by Neltharion and imprisoned in Aberrus, where his blood was constantly drained to power the facility. He was kept on the edge of death for at least ten thousand years, which has understandably driven him insane.
  • The cells imprisoning the Illidari after their origin story in the expansion Legion seem to be this; the prisoners can't move or speak, it's unclear whether they sleep, and they can see and hear everything that's going on around them.
• Warframe:
  • On Fortuna, colonists who fail to meet their quotas are forced to sell off their own body parts to pay off their debts. If this happens too many times and they run out of limbs and organs, or if they piss off Nef Anyo, they're subjected to brain-shelving, which means your head gets removed and kept alive, deprived of mobility or sensory input. Once that happens, you're not getting your body back unless someone pays off your debts and buys you a replacement body. If you have no family members or loved ones, the chances of that ever happening are very slim, and even if you do have someone working to pay off your debt, your brain could be stuck on that shelf for years, even decades, before they can get you back. Collecting Ticker's memory fragments around the Orb Vallis reveals that her lover, Volan, suffered this fate. By the time Ticker was able to get him back, he had suffered Death of Personality after decades of isolation and no longer remembered her. This may be why she chose to open a Debt Bond shop, which lets players free Fortuna workers from this fate by paying off their debts.
  • During The Sacrifice, we're introduced to Excalibur Umbra, an Orokin Dax who was restrained while Ballas telepathically taunted him about how he was going to force him to kill his own son. He was unable to warn his son of this, as his mouth was taken away by the Infestation afflicting him. What pushes this situation into this trope is that afterwards, he had all of his memories wiped except for this moment, forcing him to relive murdering his son against his will over and over for who knows how long. He was also fitted with a Restraining Bolt preventing him from taking revenge for this. Thankfully, the Operator soothes his pain and helps him defeat Ballas at the end of the quest.
  • Nightwave: Series 3 - The Glassmaker introduces yet another one of these in the form of "glassing". The Arc Villain is an Orokin judge who deliberately created it to be as horrifying as possible. The victim's body is crystallized while keeping their consciousness intact, either trapping them inside their own corpses or transferring them into a glass oubliette for the rest of eternity. If they are lucky, they are spared this fate by being made into Cephalons, usually undergoing a Death of Personality in the process. The Glassmaker turned himself into a Cephalon to survive the fall of the Orokin, intending to glass people system-wide to terrorize the Origin System into submitting to his rule. Good thing the Tenno managed to stop him and give him a taste of his own medicine.
• Welcome to the Game: "The Doll Maker" is possibly the most disturbing site in the game, as it is a horribly detailed advertisement of a European surgeon explaining how he kidnaps homeless women before completely disabling all motor functions, twisting their appearance into that of a hollow doll, and brutally torturing them into submission, permanently breaking their minds and turning them into a sentient, immobile toy to be sold and turned into a Sex Slave. Oh, and a music box rendition of "Hush Little Baby" is playing in the background. And this is a toned down version of an existing creepypasta- in that version, the girls were preteens.
• From the white chamber, this is the fate of souls trapped within the Artefact, the reality warping device that causes all the problems in the game. In the bad ending, this is also Sarah's fate.
• Who's Lila?:
  • The fate for those trapped in the Veil, which Detective Yu describes as a place without time.
  • Lila is possessing Will's body, and Will's consciousness is inside of a wheel, deep in the school's boiler rooms.
• Morkvarg in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. He was once a notorious pirate that terrorized Skellige, but was transformed into an immortal werewolf by a curse one of his own men placed on him after murdering a group of priestesses in a sacred garden. The curse prevented him from ever leaving the garden, and anything he attempted to consume turned to ashes in his mouth, causing him years of endless hunger pains. Even trying to eat his own flesh caused him incredible pain, and if he was killed he would just be resurrected in a nearby cave. Geralt has the option to lift the curse, kill him, lift the curse and kill him, or leave him to suffer.
  • After being melted by the sorcerer Vilgefortz in the books, Geralt's vampire friend Regis reveals himself to have come Back from the Dead in the third game's Blood and Wine expansion. In conversation he mentions being conscious on some level the entire time he was "dead", and feeling unimaginable terror the entire time that could have easily lasted an eternity had Detlaff not helped him regenerate.
• Wizardry IV:
  • At one point, you need to go to Hell. If you lack the appropriate items to protect yourself and leave, you get subjected to this in a Non-Standard Game Over until you are given a Mercy Kill eons later. Either you burn in the eternal flames, or you are Forced to Watch people being tortured in ways so horrible that merely seeing them is worse than hellfire.
  • If Werdna defeats Kadorto using the Green Sword, Kadorto curses Werdna to become a statue just like he was. He is fully conscious and aware of the priests that now worship him, but cannot move or speak. All he can do is wait for another adventurer to try and take the Jeweled Amulet from him, even if it takes centuries.
• Wolfenstein: The New Order: In the penultimate fight during the raid on Deathshead's compound, Blakowicz has to face off against a Mini-Mecha made as a prototype that has its entire functionality based around the human brain. What makes it this trope? The brain's "donor" is fully conscious the entire time they are attached to the machine. The especially Tear Jerker moment for Blaskowicz is that the unit he fights has the brain of the person, Wyatt or Fergus, that he had to make a Sadistic Choice to leave behind in the past, fourteen years ago. They were left as a brain without a body, trapped in an automaton which they were forced to watch be used to massacre innocents in service to the Nazi regime, and they could do nothing to stop themselves. When Blaskowicz finally defeats the machine and gives them a chance to die, they plead for it to happen.
• World of Horror: If you fail to prevent the awakening of Cthac-Atorasu the Spider-God, you get a special bad ending where it webs up everyone and everything within the town of Shiokawa, including the player character. The town's inhabitants are kept alive but helpless in a near-death state, with each person unable to do anything but wait for days, months, or possibly even years for Cthac-Atorasu to get around to eating them individually.
• X-COM: Terror from the Deep
  • Molecular Control is functionally the same as Psionic Control from the first game. However, the name (and subsequent research) indicates that you are fully aware of what's happening and completely unable to control your body as the aliens make it do whatever they want to do. Aquanauts that recover from Molecular Control have a very high chance of panicking or going berserk.
  • Bio-Drones are brains that have been attached to antigravity life-support units and then butchered into submission to the aliens. They can scream... but only to power their sonic weapon and kill others.
• Xenoblade Chronicles:
  • Fiora suffers from this until just before joining the team: in a conversation with Shulk, they reveal that someone else was controlling their body but they could still see and hear everything going on around them.
  • It's implied that any pure-blooded High Entia that get turned into Telethia suffer from this. According to some refugees that escaped from Alcamoth, some of those that transformed into Telethia tried to cover their friends and family's escape mid-transformation, and despite being otherwise feral and loyal to Zanza on the surface, stick around areas associated with their past life out of some lingering attachment, hinting at a retained degree of sentience.
• Zork: Grand Inquisitor introduces the totemizer, a nasty piece of machinery that traps any being inside a small bronze disc for eternity. What's even worse about it is that the Inquisition uses it over ten thousand times a day.
  • There's also Dalboz, who was personally trapped in a lantern by the Grand Inquisitor.
  • In earlier Return to Zork the Big Bad Morpheus has been turning his enemies to statues, leaving them fully conscious. The old guy giving you helpful hints through Tele-Orb is one such victim. Unlike other prisoners he's a telepath, which allowed him to call for help via Tele-Orb.
  • Infocom also had the Bad Ends of The Lurking Horror (You're turned into the semi-intelligent puppet of an Eldritch Abomination. In the few moments of clarity you have while in this state, you wish you had been murdered instead.) and Sorcerer (Nothing says it better than the text: "You feel an overwhelming sense of oppression as the demon seizes control of your mind and body. (...) You see the enslaved people of the land toiling to erect great idols to Jeearr. Parents offer up their own children upon these altars, as the rivers of the land fill with blood. And YOU embody Jeearr; you are cursed by ten thousand generations of victims; your face adorns the idols. And worst of all, you remain awake and aware, a witness to horror, never sleeping, and never, ever to escape.")