The Goriest, Most Brutal Moments In Video Games You Cannot Unsee

Spec Ops: The Line is a brutal game that seeks to explore the horrors of war by showing a soldier's descent into madness. While the game eventually goes off the rails into macabre psychedelia, the most horrifying moment comes midway through the story, when the player is devilishly prompted to unleash a white phosphorus strike on a camp of supposed enemies.

As soon as the player pulls the trigger, it's revealed that the camp was actually housing refugees, not adversaries. As a result of the characters' mistake, a large group of civilians burn to death, without ever being given the chance to escape. 

The game punishes the player for their complicity by lingering on the charred remains of a mother clutching her deceased child. If you have any semblance of a soul, this shot will stay burned into your consciousness for years to come. 

The Dead Space franchise follows Isaac Clark, an engineer who gets trapped in various space stations, all of which are infested with zombie monsters. To survive, Isaac must dismember the creatures' limbs, shoot their puss-filled pores, and stomp their corpses into oblivion.

In a franchise that features literally hundreds of unique death sequences, the grossest scene in the whole series surprisingly has nothing to do with zombies. At one point in Dead Space 2, there’s a cute little scene where Isaac needs a machine to insert a needle into his eyeball. The game makes it an interactive event; if the player succeeds, the needle goes in safely, but if they fail, it tears his face to shreds. Either way, you might vomit a little.

If you haven’t played through Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus yet, you should know that the game is stuffed to the brim with moments of sickening violence. Whereas in the first game, protagonist BJ Blaskowitz carries a combat knife for close-quarters encounters, the sequel sees him upgrade to a hatchet to maximize Nazi dismemberment. On top of that, the game begins by making the player shoot their beloved family pet, and doesn't let up until the triumphant, blood-drenched finale. 

Of all the moments of extreme violence depicted in the game, Caroline's beheading stands above the rest in terms of gratuity. Blaskowitz wakes up in captivity to find that Caroline — his fearless leader — has been stripped of her power armor. The moment the player spots an armor-clad Nazi dragging a massive ax, they know things are about to turn bad. 

The scene culminates with the Nazi leader beheading Caroline, then shoving her severed head directly into Blaskowitz's (and thus the player's) face. In most instances, the game graciously allows the player to look away from scenes of intense violence, but this one is rather inescapable. 

If you've ever wanted to take back America from a group of Neo-Nazis in an "alternate history" scenario, you should probably go pick up Wolfenstein II.  

The gritty, 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider is loaded with violent death animations. The story follows Lara Croft's transformation from normal researcher to vicious adventurer; a change that is sparked when the character ends up alone and afraid on a rural island. For all but the most skilled players, Lara's quest for subsistence is laden with missteps that usually result in the character getting horribly mangled. 

In one particularly nasty death sequence, Lara is dragged downstream by a bout of violent river rapids, and ends up taking a rusty metal pole right to the neck. This isn't the type of thing a health pack can cure, and Lara remains alive just long enough for the player to watch her body writhe slowly to a stop. 

Effortlessly maintaining the franchise's reputation as one of the most violent video game series of all time, God of War 3 features a multitude of brutal moments. The game begins with Kratos scaling the cliffs of Mount Olympus with plans to exact his revenge on the gods that did him dirty. 

Of all the Olypmians Kratos slays, his massacre of Poseidon is perhaps the most brutal. As Kratos approaches his fallen adversary, the player is thrown into the perspective of Poseidon, so that they can witness the Olympian's death from a first-person perspective. This means the player feels every impact as Kratos headbutts the god of the sea's skull open, then gouges his eyes out. To say it’s a gory, disturbing affair would be a massive understatement.

Oh, right after Poseidon dies, the cycle of tides on Earth is thrown into disarray, which causes mass-flooding all across the world. By killing Poseidon, Kratos inadvertently causes the deaths of basically everyone on Earth. 

Each new entry into the Mortal Kombat franchise features a wide array of gross fatalities. In MK9, Noob Saibot and his repertoire of finishers is by far the most vicious aspect of the game. Saibot's signature fatality involves him summoning his shadow clone from Mortal Kombat 2, then working in tandem with it to rip their opponent in half.