And I Must Scream/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • There is a whole game dedicated to this theme, based on the Trope Namer Harlan Ellison novel I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream. It's a classical graphic adventure game -- not that scary by the measures of our time, but back then it was Nightmare Fuel, with loads of Mind Screw and Fridge Brilliance moments. And, yes, you can play it into such a state that you become what the quote on top of this page describes. Squick.
  • Arakune of BlazBlue has this on a few levels. Originally he was a scientist, researching the neitherworld of lost souls called the Boundery. As he learned more and more, he eventually fell into the Boundery, 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 is actually fragmented and incomprehensible. 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...
    • Lambda-11's story mode in BlazBlue: Continuum Shift both plays it 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.
  • 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.
  • 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).
    • Another case appears in Dragon Quest VIII, where the townspeople of Trodain are immobilized via magical vines by Dhoulmagus. Its 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 BioShock (series) 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 that also manages to be a wallbanger, honouring his wishes and killing him is treated just as bad as killing the innocent little girls.
    • The spoilered item 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. Why they don't just fix this in a patch is beyond me.
    • There's another instance in Bioshock 2 that can be considered a good example 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 wailing 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...
  • 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.
  • In System Shock 2 the hosts of annelids worms, who eventually turn into hybrids, are forced to go through this.
  • In Alice: Madness Returns, this has happened to the White King; the Queen has turned him into the gate to her castle. Ironically, he is far more optimistic of Alice's chances than most Wonderland characters she meets. He tells her to be wary of the Queen's champion before she puts him out of his misery.
  • According to the lore behind The Elder Scrolls, this is what happens to Daedra when they are banished or killed. They can come back, but spending a few hundred years in such a state may explain why most Daedra are so keen on destroying that place where so many pesky Daedra-killing heroes come from.
    • Strangely, this doesn't bother them at all. They are, after all, truly immortal, and being inconvenienced for a few hundred years when you've lived for tens or hundred of thousands and can expect to live for hundreds of thousands (or millions) more isn't a big deal, especially if you're not a creature which has to worry about 'sanity' and other tedious things. As for the coming back; perhaps it is just something to do.
    • This doesn't seem to happen to them when you kill them normally on any of the planes. They only seem to return to some sort of spawn point in their (masters') plane in Oblivion. However, if you by means of strong magic manage to cast them into the void, they have to find their way back to a plane before they can do anything. Supposedly finding a (fairly) stable spacetime in the void takes a long time.
    • Big Bad Mehrunes Dagon suffers a particularly ironic version. As the Daedra Prince of Destruction, he exists to destroy everything and his Daedric realm reflects that, being a wasteland. However, due to the nature of Oblivion (the dimension that all daedra call home) and the immortality of all daedra, he can't actually destroy anything for good. He's the embodiment of Destruction, and he can't do squat in his own realm. It's his main motivation for trying to enter Tamriel -- there, he can cause lasting destruction.
      • And another Daedra Prince, Jyggalag the Prince of Order, suffers a similarly ironic version thanks to the other Princes. He was cursed to become Sheogorath the Prince of Madness, the opposite of everything he originally embodied.
    • The Mythic Dawn agents that you kill over the course of the game. 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 Mehunes Dagon claims victory, which will restore them all.
    • The Corprus disease from Morrowind turns you into what the page quote describes. Except you're also hungry for flesh. And you become immune to all other diseases and don't age, meaning you're stuck in this state until someone cures you. Except there is no cure.
      • There is a cure, but it only works on the player character. Anyone else who takes dies. Also, most people who have a case in their family ship them off to a quarantine, where the staff tries to ease their suffering to whatever extent they can. Finally, corprus victims can die from the disease instead of becoming immortal. Or, even if it makes them immortal, they can still be put out of their misery.
    • Also, Soul Gems. The other games had you assume that they were harmless and just capturing the soul of a dead thing that lived on peacefully. However, in Skyrim, you have 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. To make matters worse, trapping the souls of people, as long as they are killed legally, is okay and is a supported practice by the world to make enchanted items.
      • Actually, only animals and monsters can be done this. Doing it on a man, mer, or beast-man requires a special black soul gem, and is generally frowned upon.
  • This seems to be the fate of Mantorok in Eternal Darkness. 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.
    • And Anthony and Ellia both remain entomed and live on for centuries within their own rotting bodies. Mercy Kill doesn't begin to describe it.
  • In 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. 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, the fact that Braun was a Complete Monster of the first order makes it 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.
    • Feh. It's Fallout. Use a flamer.
      • But being nice gives more pluses!
      • This creates an even greater And I Must Scream situation; Harold makes it clear that harming his tree-self isn't enough to kill him; you'd have to take out his heart, which is a considerable distance away. Setting his tree body on fire, gruesome and painful as it is, does little except remove his ability to interact with the outside world. Even if all he could do was talk to people who didn't listen to a word he said, he could still talk.
    • In New Vegas, there's a potential one of these involving 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 and such in the air is lethal to his unimmunised, 261-Year-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 (for a year, we are told, until he is killed by infection) but barely able to twitch or speak, isolated/forgotten, and with no way to influence or even access his computer network. At least it's only a year.
      • At the end of Dead Money, you can sentence Father Elijah to this by getting him to trigger a trap in the Sierra Madre Vault set by casino creator Francis Sinclair for Dean Domino that locks him in the vault indefinitely. Similarly, you yourself can trigger the trap after being warned by a message left by Sinclair.
      • In Honest Hearts, Joshua Graham, who was covered in pitch and set on fire, claims that every time he changes the bandages on his body he exposes his wounds to open air and goes through the feeling of being burned alive and due to being Immune to Drugs chems such as Stimpacks or Med-X (AKA morphine) are useless to him. Being The Atoner, he believes that he deserves just this. They don't call him "The Burned Man" for nothing.
      • Lonesome Road introduces the Marked Men, Ghouls whose flesh have been stripped off by the harsh winds of The Divide, kept alive through pure rage and hatred.
    • In Fallout 4: Nuka-World, the head of Nuka-Cola inventor John-Caleb Bradberton is trapped underground, still alive, and has been like this for over 200 years.
  • Fate/stay night. Fate route. Under the church. Made worse by the fact that if you DON'T go there it's game over for you. Despite the protagonist actually saying that he feels a massive evil pressence from the church's basement and that he should leave. This feeling has saved his and Saber's life around 5 times before, but the game designers suddenly just expect you to go against it. And the reward is Body Horror. Joy.
    • And then there's the Bad End where Caster turns Shirou into a living wand for projection magecraft. Yeesh.
    • And the Bad End where Ilya puts Shirou's soul in a doll. And the one where she carries off his severed but still living head to torture. Really, this trope shows up with disturbing frequency.
  • 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 spikey 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.
    • Additionally, Seto's mind and awareness are implied to be intact given that he sheds tears after Nanaki's speech. Despite being turned to stone.
  • The villagers of Kolima in Golden Sun are turned into trees for attempting to cut down the local tree divinity.Fortunately, Isaac's party eventually frees them, but according to some dialogues, they had been that way for several weeks.
    • You can even use Telepathy to read their minds:some are desperate, some saddened, some simply resigned.Also, on the way to the village there is a group of three trees who are later knocked down.Two of them are forced to helplessly watch as their companion is threatened to be dragged away by the river.
  • Adel of Final Fantasy VIII 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...
  • In 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 Final Aeon. What the summoners and guardians don't know is that the Final Aeon doesn't destroy Sin, but is possessed by the spirit within (known as Yu Yevon) and rebuilt into a new Sin. The guardian waits inside Sin's body, conscious of the carnage he is causing but helpless to stop it, trapped inside Sin until a new Final Aeon takes his place. The summoner at least gets a quick death by psychic blast when Yu Yevon possesses the Final Aeon.
    • Similarly, each Aeon represent the spirit of a person who willingly sacrificed their life to benefit a summoner. We learn later that the body and mind of that person are encased in crystal, potentially forever.
  • In Final Fantasy V, the Big Bad, Exdeath, has been transformed into a tree for the last thirty years.
    • Actually, Exdeath was a tree from the start. More accurately, a tree used by an old tribe to seal away various demons. Somewhere along the way, the intense evil magic power made him gain sentience and shapeshifting powers. During the final battle, all of those evil spirits are released when Exdeath loses control over the void. Whoops.
  • 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. By itself being turned into a Cie'th seems horrifying enough, but when 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.
    • Succeeding in the focus isn't much better, they turn to crystal and gain eternal life...at the price of being unable to move, speak, or do anything at all, not much is elaborated on about crystal stasis beyond turning into one, but it thankfully seems they're not conscious under the shell.
      • Serah elaborates on turning into a crystal during the sequel; she describes the moment of transformation as the scariest and loneliest in her entire life, but ultimately subverts this by saying that she spent most (if not all) of her time in stasis dreaming of happy times with Lightning and Snow. And it's proven that those in crystal stasis are aware by Crystal!Vanille commenting that Hope frequently visits Fang and her (in one of the fragments).
  • Final Fantasy VI has a bizarre subversion: When Espers die, they're turned into crystals called Magicite, but they can still be summoned and still communicate.
  • 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 GMan, which he came out of some ten years later, looking just fine, so it may just be a cryogenic sleep of sorts.)
    • Also, the Headcrab Zombies. Oh sweet merciful crap, 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.
    • 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.
  • Legacy of Kain: Defiance implies that between the end of Soul Reaver 2 and the start of Defiance Raziel has spent half a millenium 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 at the end of Defiance; the soul reaver (and presumably Raziel as well) were purified at the spirit forge. It was a curse for the imperfect soul reaver, but perhaps the purified one isn't a tortured existence.
    • Plus, after it was realised 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.
  • 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.
  • Mother 3: Pokey/Porky's fate in the Absolutely Safe Capsule, shortly after being defeated by the heroes. Subverted somewhat, in the fact this may just be exactly how he likes it.
    • That'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 would still be alive inside that thing.
    • Also, Klaus in a more psychological sense and Giygas depending on your interpretation.
  • Three characters from the Myst series ended up this way, at least before the Trap Books were ret-conned into Prison Ages. It can also happen to the player in some of the 'bad' endings.
  • Semi-aversion: While they are naturally very long-lived (even without their periodic centuries-long hibernation,) the most esteemed elders of the Vahnatai race in Exile/Avernum are offered the chance to be magically infused into special stones, becoming immortal, magically powerful, but completely unmoving crystal souls.
    • Not averted in Exile 3/Avernum 3 if you talk to the two Crystal Souls in the single Upper Avernum/Exile Vahnatai city: These are the two guys 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 with them. Though I guess since the Vahnatai did eventually get them back, and all the other ones are safe deep down in the earth, generally, it's not that bad.
      • Considering that the Vahnatai thought it would be an appropriate response to strip the surface world of all life, yes, it was that bad.
  • 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 anymore time alone in the tomb.
  • In Neverwinter Nights 2, the dragon Nolaloth has spent millenia 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 Neverwinter Nights 2: 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.
  • Trilby gets this treatment in Yahtzee's Six 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. The same goes for Cabadath, an ancient druid who summoned but failed to control Chzo ages ago, and whose soul was joined to a tree, essentially granting him immortality and allowing him to manifest himself as The Prince to whoever disturbs the wood of the tree.
    • Also, the short story Expedition set in the same universe has denizens of the Magical Realm, beings whose physical bodies have become almost entirely atrophied from a reliance on magic. When one is captured by The Prince the narrator realizes that the low hissing sound he makes while being tortured is him trying to scream with his mostly vestigal vocal chords.
  • Lisa from Resident Evil. She's kidnapped, experimented on, turns immortal, only wants her mother, kills her mother by mistaking her as an impostor, wears her mom's face over her own so she doesn't forget her face, was abandoned by the scientists, is left living forever in what might be grueling pain wandering around a mansion, and by looking at the original Resident Evil and the Umbrella Chronicles, Lisa has "died" three times. First Jill or Chris make 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.
    • 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 Weskerm, 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...
  • Sonic the Hedgehog subjects Erazor Djinn to this fate in Sonic and the Secret Rings, using the third wish from Erazor's own lamp in a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
    • And then he tosses it into a giant container of molten metal.
    • Shadow the Hedgehog was forced to sleep in a container for 50 years with the knowledge that his only friend had sacrificed her life to save him. Suffice to say, he did not take this well.
      • Mad enough to A) Try to wipe out the human race, B) Successfully destroyed the Black Arms alien race, C)takes down 40 or 50 GUN troopers in a level on Shadow the Hedgehog, although it happens in his memories of BEFORE Maria is killed.
    • 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.
  • In 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.
  • 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
  • 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 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. Because it's not like you can kill them.
    • And presumably they're still there, eternally trapped as screaming red jelly. The bastards.
  • Aaron from Clive Barker's Undying was chained in a dungeon and eaten alive by rats, with his jaw removed so he couldn't scream.
  • This is what happened to Ner'zhul when Kil'jaeden captured him and transformeated him into the Lich King between Warcraft 2 and 3.
    • 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's short story on the official website.
  • Revealed in Metal Gear Solid 4, Big Boss was held in suspended state by the Patriots, somewhat aware and somewhat not.
    • And when he was released, Solidus took up the job.
  • Yuri's fate in the Allied ending of Command & Conquer Red Alert 2: Yuris 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.
  • EVE Online chronicles has a few: First there are the Nightmare Fuel 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.
  • Alma from F.E.A.R. 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.
  • X-COM Terror From The Deep gives us the Bio-Drones, 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.
  • 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 had 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".
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, with its 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 unclamied items back into Pokémon, suggesting that all items are really Pokémon.
    • Pokémon in general - what exactly happens to Pokémon in Poké Balls? Are they conscious? How about Pokémon that get sent to the PC? Do they live in a virtual world?
      • The trophies in Super Smash Bros. games state that Poké Balls contain miniature worlds for them to live in. The anime states that Pokémon rest there in a special habitat designed for them.
      • And in the Pokémon Special manga, they just become tiny and are kept inside the balls. They're fully conscious and can move, but don't seem to mind. Pikachu even walks inside the Poké Ball so that it rolls around like a hamster ball.
    • 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 {{spoiler|someone [[Dystopia Justifies the Means|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.
  • 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.
  • As revealed in Mega Man Zero 4, this was the punishment of Dr. Weil for his orchestration of the Elf Wars. His consciousness was implanted into a constantly-regenerating armor, making him somewhat immortal. 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.
    • He suffers an even worse fate than that later. After Zero defeated him for good, Weil, fused to the remains of Ragnarok, remains immortal, but now, he's completely immobile. He could've stayed that way forever if it weren't for an unlucky group of humans that 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?
  • Gremio's fate in Suikoden I - if being eaten alive by flesh-eating spores isn't a classic case, I don't know what is.
  • Jovani in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess sold his soul to the Poes and was turned into a living gold-and-jewel statue.
    • He could still talk.
      • And after you got a certain number of Poe Souls, he was able to move again.
    • Also, in A Link to The Past, the Flute Boy in the Haunted Grove turns into a living tree, and in Majoras Mask, the Deku Butler's son was also turned into a tree.
      • It's implied that they're actually dead. 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.
    • The Skultulla Cursed Family in Ocarina of Time could very well fit in this trope. They can't free themselves and being it a side-quest, you could skip it completely.
      • Actually, 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.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword loves this trope:
    • 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 of precious "Time 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 "Time Stone" (that "resets" his personal timeline to a point in the past) is shown as fully aware of being living on borrowed time.
    • Lanayru himself ,before you can fix it,, 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.
    • Zelda has to seal herself for several thousands of years, sleeping to direct her energies to the seal keeping The Imprisoned in, unable to wake up on her own.
    • And Skyward Sword also added 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 conciousness 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 conciousness stuck to rot in Ganondorf's petrifyied 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.
  • In the first Jak and Daxter game, the Big Bads' ultimate fate is being sealed, still alive and conscious, inside a silo of Dark Eco.
  • Anyone in Silent Hill who dies in the eponymous town is eternally trapped there, forever subjected to whatever tortures the sadistic Genius Loci can conjure. Some deserve it. Others... don't.
    • Even monsters suffer, in Homecoming, ending specific, 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 incoherant groaning noises.
      • The main bosses of that game Joey: the mayors 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!
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, Shale was unactivated, but never the less capable of thought, for 30 years in the middle of some little peasant village. As a result of this, Shale has a deep, 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.
    • Meanwhile, 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.
    • As well as 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.
  • Maple Story,
    • The hero Aran was frozen in ice for hundreds of years, courtesy of a curse placed on the heroes by the Black Mage. Although he was asleep during this time, his/her Empathic Weapon Maha remained fully conscious.
    • He's not very pleased about this, especially when he finds out this caused Aran to forget him.
      • Well think about it: Maha had to sit in the polearm for hundreds of years. He can't speak to Aran over the distance and is possibly kept sane by the thoughts of Aran coming to save him. Cue Aran walking past him several times, not noticing him. When Aran finally sees Maha again Aran's forgotten all about him.
    • Many of the heroes who were around during the Black Mage’s initial reign of terror, including the whole population of Elluel (even the children!) were cursed by the villain with Human Popsicle as well, and it was only through the Elf Queen's intervention (who saw this coming and tried but failed to prevent it) who used powerful spell to ease their suffering by letting them sleep until future heroes could break the curse. Zero Beta, however, wasn’t so lucky, she was conscious the whole time. She even lampshades this later if the player gets a bad score in an attempt to raise their crafting skill - "I was in that temple for a thousand years, and that was boring!"
    • Another example, Lucid, who suffers this fate three times:
      • Initially, Lucid was a friend of Mercedes from childhood, but always believed she was The Unfavorite to their mentor, Athena Pierce. After mastering dream magic, jealously eventually caused her to forsake the elves entirely, and used dark magic to purge the memory of her from her kin. So, when the Black Mage’s curse took hold, she was exempt from the Elf Queen’s spell, remaining conscious and awake the whole time. But unlike Zero Beta, she lacked the iron will of a Transcendent, and spending centuries in this miserable condition (which ironically, ended when the Black Mage found her and saw potential in her powers) slowly drove her mad.
      • But it did not end there for poor Lucid. When she realized that the Black Mage’s intent was to eradicate all of existence (himself included) she decided to present him with an alternate plan. She created Lachelein, a city created from her own dreams where festivity never ends and happiness is eternal, which would spread over Maple World. She hoped her master would see this exquisite splendor and change his mind. But when the City of Dreams was complete, a brief moment of sanity made her realize the scope of what she had done, and she tried to flee. She could not. Her own creation has made her both ruler and prisoner of the dream that has now become a nightmare.
      • When finally defeated by the player, Lucid is still not given the mercy of dying. Her defeat gives her a Heel Realization that fully cures her madness. In an attempt to atone for all she has done, she travels through the astral plane into the subconsciuos of the Black Mage himself, determined to convince him to halt his mad plan, even if she dies in the attempt. She does not. Delving into the darkest part of his psyche, she instead sees the motvation for his goals, the unbridled hate he has for beings who made him what he is. This ghastly revelation causes her to flee, only to be catapulted into a void of utter darkness, where she remains not only alone and helpless, but knowing she was abandoned by the being she had so long revered. She was finally rescued at the end of the whole Arcane River storyline by Protective Mask, who unbeknowst to her (and everyone else) was an embodiment of her own conscience, which had taken the form of Mercedes. The real Mercedes took custody of her old friend and brought her back to Elluel - whether Lucid will ever truly recover remains to be seen.
  • 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.
    • 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 Heart endured And I Must Scream by entering an unending Battle in the Center of the Mind with Master Xehanort, which has been going on for over ten years. His soul, on the other hand, is trapped inside of his 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 Sentiment is a tad unbalanced when Sora accidentally encounters him, having a brief breakdown when Sora's presence reminds him of Xehanort and rampaging until Sora beats him to calm him 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 owners' being left in there, unable to fight off the intruder without his soul and heart.
  • Afterlife 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.
  • In Homeworld: Cactaclysm the Bentusi (a advanced space-faring race that exist as individuals physically linked with their ships) preferred suicide to being captured and corrupted by 'The Beast' - a borg-like infection entity that took control over any ship it touched. Normally, it would convert the crew of a ship into 'bio-matter' that was recycled into bio-circuitry. With the Bentusi, who are linked directly to the ship itself, the beast's infection rendered the ship's sole crew member completely paralyzed and corrupted, unable to move or act of their own accord. As such, any Bentusi that was infected would destroy itself before being corrupted.
  • Implied in Mass Effect 2 by the confused, yet relieved expression with which the Collector General faces death after being released from Harbinger's control. Also, the Fate Worse Than Death of anybody who gets taken alive by the Collectors consists of suffering this while waiting to be processed into pure genetic slurry and watching others endure the same agonizing fate.
    • 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, 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 and greatest 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.
    • The Expanded Universe 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.
    • The Project Overlord DLC. David Archer is strapped to a machine intended to be a Geth mind control device 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 that means he probably finds loud noise really disquieting. By the time you get to him his mind is broken by the trauma to the degree that can only scream for the voices to stop and recite math equations -- and the renegade option involves leaving him there.
  • The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena introduces us to the Ghost Drones, who are humans that 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.
  • In 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.
      • Her 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.
  • The Super Mario games: Koopa's Hell, a video by College Humor about a Koopa rebounding between two pipes indefinitely.
  • In Umineko no Naku Koro ni, this is the consequence of a witch causing a Logic Error. The offending witch becomes trapped in the paradox until they can think of a way to resolve it -- or for all eternity, whichever comes first.
  • In the Girls Love Visual Novel Akai Ito, Nozomi was trapped inside the Ryugetsu for... a long time. Even though in other characters' route she is always a villain, when you are in her route it's explained that she was a princess of some sort, and discarded her original body to obtain freedom from the deadly political game of her era. She then became a ghost that is attached to the Ryugetsu. How did she accomplish this? By making deal with Nushi, which, at that time, seemed sympathetic. When Nushi was defeated and sealed by the onikiri, she became trapped in the mirror. As she wondered why Nushi never come for her, her psyche crumbled, and out of loneliness (and low self-esteem, she's really a messed-up person) she created another persona that act as her twin little sister. But It Got Worse: That little sister, Mikage, was really a part of Nushi's shattered soul, and manipulates her into manipulating the owner of the mirror to do atrocious things, all to free Nushi.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 the Main Character is turned into the Great Seal preventing the culmination of humanities call for death, Erebus, from reaching Nyx, a stoic being that will cause all people to become mindless husks, and bringing about the end of the world. It can be assumed that the main character is still conscious in this state and must spend an eternity guarding humanity against complete annihilation.
    • Persona 4 mentions that Elizabeth has left the Velvet Room and is currently searching for a way to free the Main Character from this.
  • 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.
    • 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.")
  • 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.
  • 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
  • Knights of the Old Republic gives us the mind prison. An almost-featureless open space in which undesirable minds are trapped, with no possibility of esacpe, nothing to see and very little to do. Supposedly they are reopened at a suitable time, but some are forgotten for millennia...
  • Parodied in Freeman's Mind episode 3: "I have no tail, and I must swing".
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • Happens to Wheatley in Portal 2. 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.
    • However, unlike most examples, he has someone else to experience it with. Even if he won't shut up.
    • What about GLaDOS? She tells you that she had to relive her last two minutes over and over again for HUNDREDS of YEARS!
    • GLaDOS intends to get revenge on Chell by forcing her to go through the Apature Center tests at least until she dies of old age, and claims she will spend the time researching ways to animate the dead in order to make it even longer. Amazingly though, she eventually forgives Chell and lets her leave, though it's mostly because she finds dealing with Chell to be more trouble than it's worth.
  • The Lord of the Dead in King's Quest 6 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 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.
  • 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 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.
  • In 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.
  • 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 head: Kill me.
Medic: Later.

    • Played for Laughs in that the spy's head seems more annoyed with his situation than horrified.
  • This is the basic premise of the Spirit Overload ending in Hellsinker.
  • Dead Island gives us Suicider zombies. A type of zombie that explodes on proximity to survivors. They still retain thier minds, however, and are forced to roam the island looking for help, only to be gunned down by survivors. They can sometimes be heard saying "Help me" before exploding.
  • Dark Souls: The eventual and inevitable fate of all those cursed with the Darkbrand and whoever links the Fire.
  • In Baten Kaitos, the five islands are kept aloft by pieces of the dead god of evil, Malpercio. In the prequel, 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?
  • In Sonic Generations, its heavily implied that Sonic's friends that have been petrified by the Time Eater are fully conscious and aware. Not a fun thought.
    • Also from Generations, we have 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 acesses 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. Earlier in the game, Classic!Eggman was disturbed at how maniacal Modern!Eggman was. This was probably a major contributor to that. Thanks for breaking the villain, Sonic.
  • Arcanum has several cases of this.
    • The most obvious example are The Gray Legionaires, 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 senceless, but still concious.
    • In the very first location, you encounter the spirit of a thug, cursed to be trapped in his dead body forever, in constant pain. Hovever, 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 existance.
    • In the Void, 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 ocasionally with Kerghan. And the Void is the weird place where the only way to die is by violence. 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 medaiilon (which was given to the undead). If you get the medallion in posession, it will say that this place hurts it, and plead for release.
  • 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 the Nightmare King and locked away in a room inside a dungeon all alone. He even lampshades 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
  • 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 other Steef and have their heads mounted on his wall. Not only that, but Sekto also dammed the river and persecuted the Grubbs that that particular Steef used to protect. And it's implied that the Steef was concious 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. But at least the Steef dies as himself, and with the knowledge that the river is free.
  • Thaddius in World of Warcraft zig-zags this. When you read up on Thaddius, you find out that Thaddius is made from the flesh of women and children, and their souls are stuck underneath that. By the way, you know that "Please noooo!" and "Help me! Save me!" cries you hear? That's Thaddius. When you run after these voices, Thaddius shouts, "You are too late, I must obey!". Zig-zagged the most because upon death, Thaddius says, "Thank...you."
  • In the MMORPG 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 recent quest had the player character find a way to release the consciousness into TzHaar that were born without memories, using a Tokkul that had been made very recently. That one TzHaar had a bad Heroic BSOD, and was nearly driven insane. From a recently made Tokkul. And there are Tokkul that have been in circulation for hundreds of years. Think about it.
  • 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 magus 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.
  • Lechuck plans to do this to Guybrush in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, burning his flesh of his body, leaving only his bones "still alive and very much in pain" which he'll make into a chair that screams when he sits on it. Luckily Guybrush escapes before this happens.
  • In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates The Big Bad Galdes is stuck, eternally repeating his action of casting a spell to undo the heroes' victory over him. "Over, and again."
  • 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.
  • One of the endings in the Lovecraftian Interactive Fiction Anchorhead involves the protagonist being trapped in a dimension filled with nothing but "the necrotic folds of the womb of Nehilim".
  • In the original Castlevania timeline, this is the possible fate of Sara, the girl who, in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, willingly sacrificed her tainted soul to Rinaldo's whip, turning it into the Vampire Killer, the weapon the Belmont Clan would wield from that point on against Dracula. But in Castlevania: Chronicles of Sorrow, Chaos is destroyed, meaning Dracula's foul legacy is forever vanquished and the Vampire Killer's purpose is fulfilled. But then, what of Sara? Optimistic fans might surmise that she finally went to her just reward, but the darker possibility is, her soul will be trapped in the weapon forever. fara
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