Body Horror/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Sauroid enemies in Arc Rise Fantasia are all revealed to be humans in the midst of transforming into feldragons, the same creatures the protagonist spent his entire life slaying.
  • In Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, when you get your D-Counter to 100% and give up, a game over scene will play in which you get to see Ryu's silhouette on a red background getting brutally, mercilessly torn apart by Odjn literally bursting out of his body all while hearing Ryus screams of agony. Pretty unusual for a JRPG to actually kill the main character, let alone in such a violent way.
  • Thought seeing the chestburster explode out of John Hurt's chest was bad enough? The second level of the Alien campaign in Alien vs. Predator 2 starts out in the host's torso, with you as the chestburster. No prizes for guessing what you have to do.
  • A trailer for BioShock (series) features the first-person protagonist in hand-to-hand combat with some kind of armored figure (probably a Big Daddy). He injects himself with an EVE plasmid into his arm, which causes the limb to apparently rot, whereupon a swarm of bees flies out of his arm while he screams bloody murder.
    • In addition to your hand becoming a living beehive, switching to other plasmids cause icy spikes to burst out of your hand (yes, with traces of blood) or your hand to be covered with horrific burns.
    • Overuse of the miraculous gene tonics and "plasmids" that grant these special abilities leads to a different kind of body horror -- many of the Splicers encountered in Rapture are visibly deformed, in some cases featuring huge tumors growing out of their misshapen and twisted faces.
      • Though the Splicers shown in-game are undeniably horrific -- the most notable being the Crawler of Bioshock 2 -- there are many Splicer designs that just didn't make the cut, though they helped in getting Bioshock made. There was Yam-Hand, a big, hulking, blue-collar type with one giant, potato-esque hand that he was forced to use almost like a club/cane/crutch, to the point where he stood like a gorilla. There was a man whose skin had literally begun to melt off of him, revealing various innards and bones. And there were various parasite-infested people, who basically weren't even people anymore. They had been taken over by insects, who had grown inside of them, and then, eventually, OUT of them. They were basically gigantic insects with various limbs, faces, and articles of clothing protruding from them. "Squick", indeed.
    • There was one Big Daddy design that was "no fun to fight" that had Combat Tentacles growing from its wrists and humeri.
    • The Big Daddy-fication process is Nightmare Fuel (skin melted off, grafted into a diving suit, implanted with a voice box, mind wiped, etc.).
  • One enemy type in Bullet Witch is misleadingly called grubs. They're actually what happens when the ghosts Screamers spew possess a person -- a grotesquely distorted human with a bizarre, bloated head, that moves in a freakish way, and attacks you by biting you with its ribs and spewing fire.
  • Clock Tower: The First Fear: has a severely deformed ten-year-old named Bobby, a mummified corpse you find in the trophy room, and a huge, deformed, purple infant-looking thing who is the twin brother of Bobby.
  • In Silent Hill 3, Heather turns out to be "pregnant" with a freakish demon which she is supposed to give birth to.
    • Many of the monsters, especially in 3 and Homecoming, are, of course, quite body-horrific, e.g. the Bubble Head Nurses, the Abstract Daddy, the Pendulums, the Siam, and the centipede made of human torsoes.
    • The scene where the demon is exorcised from Alessa in the good ending of 1.
  • MUCH of the Resident Evil series.
    • The Keeper's Journal in the first Resident Evil is a long, detailed description of the transformation of a normal person into a zombie. It runs from the initial outbreak at the Umbrella Arkley Lab, to the Keeper noticing strange sores appearing all over his body, to him scratching off a chunk of rotting flesh from his own arm and finding himself mysteriously hungry.
    • The Chest Burster in Resident Evil 2, and needless to say, William Birkin's mutations.
    • Nosferatu, the tragic mutation of Alexander Ashford in Code Veronica.
    • Resident Evil 4 plays this with Las Plagas (literally, "The Pests" in Spanish), some sort of strange being that takes over the host's body, and submits his will and mind to Saddler's own purposes. As you play the game, you can see how Las Plagas are slowly taking over the bodies of Leon and Ashley.
    • Resident Evil 5 has Uroboros. Some of the Majini mutate into nastier forms after doing a certain amount of damage to them, similr to popping off the head of a Los Ganados from RE4 ("the cow" or "the herd" in Spanish).
    • Revelations might just top all of these with a specific mutation caused by the T-Abyss virus; the Scagdead. Not only is the actual mutation very nasty, but the actual progression is worse; the host is never actually killed by the virus and then resurrected, no; they are still alive and conscious for the duration of the infection. And that happens when you're resistant to the virus.
  • The X Parasites in Metroid Fusion take over sapient beings, consume their bodies and then mimic their DNA, becoming perfect physical copies and gaining their intelligence...but without any of their higher emotions, living only to feed and reproduce. The Metroids were created to hunt and destroy them, confining them to SR-388, but Samus was hired to exterminate the Metroids. Oops.
    • In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Samus is infected by The Corruption and is slowly transforming into her Evil Twin, Dark Samus.
      • In the other two Prime games, there is also Body Horror in the mutations caused by said Corruption, and Enemy Scans of some dead creatures (mutants in the first, victims of the Ing in Prime 2: Echoes).
  • X-COM: UFO Defense had the infamous Chrysalids, insect-like humanoid aliens who could turn any X-Com soldier or civilian into a bulging, misshapen zombie with a single egg-injecting melee attack. The zombies are essentially still-living meat-suits for the juvenile Chrysalids, who erupt out of the zombies like someone popping out of a too-small shirt after the zombie takes too much damage.
    • X-Com: Terror from the Deep had the Tentaculats, who did essentially the same thing.
    • Not to mention the things the Aliens are implied to visit upon captured humans. The lucky ones are turned into alien food or dissected, while the unlucky ones...well, the Bio-Drone from Terror from the Deep is a brain in a vat with an anti-gravity base and a sonic weapon, controlled by implanted alien electronics. TftD also features a creature called the "Deep One", which is essentially a living human-turned-alien-incubator. The description of a device called alien implanter reads: "...this [removal/addition of organs and electronics] was thought to be done to unconscious subjects, but research suggests that the subject is conscious and painfully aware. The human physiology fits this device unfortunately well."
      • The Bio-Drone's sonic weapon was built out of the original human's vocal chords. It literally screams its victims to death.
    • Some of the critters from the UFO: After Blank series look equally unpleasant, like Cudgels and Dangleflies. Car Crabs, on the other hand, are awesome.
  • Quake IV is positively rife with body horror, from apparently living human chests with computers for heads attached to walls and the Strogg medical facility level, where the player has to watch helplessly - from first-person perspective, no less - as Cpl. Matthew Kane gets a painful-looking injection of steroids, has his legs cut off with a buzzsaw and new cybernetic legs attached as well as a neural implant stabbed into his brain. The fact that you see all of this happen to another prisoner before you (and hear his screams) does not make it any less horrifying, either. Perhaps the most unsettling sight is that of Kane's bloody leg-stumps quivering after his legs have been amputated. The scene (not for the faint of heart) is here if you want to see it.
  • The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask. The vital mask transformations have some of the most painful Transformation Sequences ever put to cartridge.
    • The House of Skulltula in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time...that father and his 5 sons used to be human...
    • There's also the guy who's turning into a Gibdo in Majora's Mask.
    • Link's first transformation into a wolf in The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, when thrown into the Twilight Realm for his first time, has a theme of the wolf bursting out from inside him.
  • In Yume Nikki, Madotsuki can stumble upon a little girl named Monoko wandering in a tunnel in the White Desert. Seems relatively normal, right? If Madotsuki flashes the Stoplight ability at her, however, Monoko instantly turns into a five-armed freak of nature (one of those arms is coming out of her head!) with what appears to be a melting eye and some sort of vortex in her stomach.
  • Eternal Darkness, a game rife with Nightmare Fuel, has the Bonethieves. Bonethieves are insectoid creatures with scythes for arms that rip into a victim's neck and enter the body, taking it over and killing the person. The body is then used to attack anyone who isn't infected.
  • In the Half Life series, parasitic creatures called headcrabs latch onto the skulls of humans, taking over their body and causing gross mutations. These include growing elongated claws, a gaping maw in the chest, and rotting. During all of this, the host is still at least partially conscious. If played backwards, the moans of the 'Headcrab Zombies' can clearly be heard to say "Help God Help! Help me!"
    • In Half-Life 2, this was changed so that headcrab zombies "merely" have slightly pointed fingers and a large hole in their abdominal cavity. This is compenstated by the inclusion of both fast zombies, which are missing all of their skin and sound like a dog being run over by a steam roller, and poision zombies, which are bloated to twice their width and throw black hissing headcrabs at you. That player could also remove the headcrab from the host, revealing that the host's face is locked into a perpetual scream. Thanks, Valve.
    • The Overwatch soliders fought throughout and the Stalkers seen in the Citadel are what the Combine has planned for humanity, draining them of "unnecessary" organs and fluids and cramming them with electronics. For bonus points, the other Synth units appear to be this same process applied to various alien species, implying the Combine have done this to who knows how many planets.
    • And to mix things up, there's the Zombine: A Combine soldier taken over by a headcrab. Unlike regular zombies, they are still connected to the Combine network.
  • The annelid Hybrids, and pretty much anything to do with The Many from System Shock 2. Imagine a mind-contolling alien parasitic worm that assimilates you into its Hive Mind. Now imagine that worm BURROWED INTO YOUR SKULL AND CHEST, and that the infection can also mutate you into a monster that doesn't even vaguely resemble humanity anymore. Hearing the audio logs of the crew members that fell under the control of The Many, documenting their slow transformation (often without them even realizing what's happening to them) is one the most terrifying parts of the game.
  • Halo: The Flood. An extragalactic virus with a Hive Mind. Infection forms the size of facehuggers can attach themselves to any body, living or dead, and completely take over their nervous system while simultaneously mutating them into tentacled combat forms or bloated carrier forms. And they always swarm you. To make matters worse, the Flood can regrow their entire population if one infection form is left, and they gain all the victim's memories.
    • In Halo 3, the Flood Infection Forms can jump onto a human, Elite, or Brute, burrow into their chest (or mouth, in the case of the Brutes), and mutate them into a combat form within a few seconds, complete with horrified screaming from the victim (the cries of the Marines are particularly jarring), sensory tentacles popping out from the point of penetration, horrific gray flesh sprouting across the victim's body, seeing the actual head of the victim. Perhaps the most disturbing part is that when an Infection Form jumps on a character, the NPC will grapple with it for a few seconds to give the player the chance to shoot it off. This means that if any allies are infected, it's all your fault.
    • A Marine in the level "Floodgate" nicely spells it out for you:

Marine: "I...I didn't have a choice...! The L.T...the Sergeant...they were all infected! I could see it crawling...sliding around beneath their skin! (sobs) A-and then they got up...they s-started to talk! Oh, God! Their voices! Oh, God! No, make them stop! I did them a favor...y-yeah, that's it; I helped them! (sobs) Maybe...maybe I need to help myself...(breaks out into sobs)"

  • This trope is the whole premise of Parasite Eve.
  • The Necromorphs of Dead Space are alien parasites that infect dead bodies. The infected corpses reanimate and start growing all sorts of disgusting appendages to kill the player with, such as bone claws and tentacles.
    • But among them, the Guardians and Dividers fit into this trope the most.
    • For an added extra dosage of sheer WTF: Unitology worships these things! Their whole religion is basically deifying the instruction manual that humans used to create the Necromorphs in the first place ( the Black Marker was an alien artifact, but humans decoded the information on it and, in a Species fashion, the genetic code for the Necromorphs was amongst that info, while the Red Marker was also made by humans using reverse-engineering of the Black Marker), treating being turned into a Necromorph as the key to becoming a "divine, immortal being". Needless to say, many of the more sane Unitologists started having doubts about their beliefs when actually confronted with the reality of the Necromorphs.
  • The Chimera from Resistance; they'll happily mutate anyone into becoming one of them, wrap in cocoons and becoming freaks of nature. Deadulus was once a human...
    • Resistance 3 allows the player to inflict this trope on enemies with the Mutator, a gun that causes its target to sprout explosive pustules.
  • Clive Barker's Jericho is utterly rife with this. All of the monsters in this game were once human: upon becoming trapped in The Box/The Pyxis and succumbing to death, they are "assimilated" by the Firstborn. Upon returning to life, they have transformed into grotesque parodies of their former selves. Some of the more extreme examples include Arnold Leach, who has transformed into a winged creature with his eyes being forcefully held open by what appears to be thick leather straps punching through his eyelids and scalp; the Crusaders, who have replaced several of their limbs with assorted weaponry and nailed their own armour to their flesh, and the Corpses Behomoths, who are essentially a mass of human corpses held together by a collective mind, formed into the shape of huge, crawling creatures, with a metal mask held onto their "faces" via strips of skin, through which they spit toxic corpse chunks.
  • Siren is rife with examples of this.
  • The Splatterhouse series holds two examples, both using the same character: Jennifer, Rick's girlfriend. In the first game in the series, Jennifer turns into a monster when you least expect it -- right after you believe you've saved her. In the third game, Jennifer is infected by a Boreworm, and your performance in the first couple of levels determines whether you save her or whether she becomes another monster you have to kill.
    • "Rick, I'M DYING!"/"Help...me..."
  • The aforementioned Tzimisce get their share of creeps in Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. First, you find a snuff film in which a woman is torn to pieces by what look like demonic heads with arms for legs. Then you find the house where it was filmed, only to find out the thing is wall-papered in flesh. Then you go into the basement, only to fight the Tzimisce responsible, who summons more of the head things and turn into blood. Then, you have to fight your way through the sewers, where an even worse Tzimisce experiment awaits -- giant spider-like things made from the torsos of three women. Enjoy.
    • Not mentioning Ming Xiao, the head of Los Angeles Kuei-Jin, who turns into a huge red blob with tentacles and then proceeds to beat the shit out of you.
  • The true form of Mimi from Super Paper Mario deserves an honorable mention -- if she weren't done in a cartoony art-style loosely inspired by NES games, the appearance of a little girl with a bizarrely-warped, upside-down head with spider legs coming out of it, and her now limp and useless body dangling below her in a parody of The Thing would be Grade-A Nightmare Fuel, and it still manages to be creepy even with that art style.
    • Her The Exorcist-esque transformation sequence, in which she breaks her own neck (with an audible CRACK), doesn't help much.
  • In the Nintendo 64 game Sin and Punishment, the main character Saki is transformed into an enormous, mindless bioweapon looking like something out of Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's apparently caused by a cascade of blood that inexplicably washes over Tokyo. Eventually he regains his human form, somewhat.
  • In Persona 3, pretty much the entirety of the main character's first Persona summoning. When he pulls the trigger on the Evoker to summon his Persona, he has a really creepy smile on his face, complete with glowing eyes. To top it off, shortly after summoning his Persona, it gets ripped apart from the inside by another, far more brutal and powerful Persona, all while the main character is screaming and clutching his head. Turns out later in the game that the Persona that clawed its way out of Orpheus is Thanatos, aka Death, who was sealed inside the main character ten years prior by Aigis. Considering that the main character's first Persona summoning is against one of the 12 major Shadows used to form the Appriser when destroyed, which also includes Death, this makes a lot of sense.
  • Mentioning the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, Issamu in Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne starts of as being a completely normal fellow, but as he spends time in the vortex world, the emotions of people who died in the Conception begin to cling to him, taking the form of empty faces covering his upper body. The fact that he stops wearing his shirt afterwards do not help.
  • Every game in the Trauma Center series has an infection/virus/whatever ripping people's organs, draining them, digging through hearts, creating reproducing tumors that put bunnies in heat to shame, etc.
    • Ironically, every single game in the series which 80% playtime consist of graphically showing blood, gore and cutting people up with knives received a T rating from ESRB! Getting Crap Past the Radar indeed.
  • In Dawn of Mana, the unleashing of the Echoes from the Mana Tree turns everyone into "Grimslies", and in addition to getting some really weird-looking face-vine...things, they're Drunk on the Dark Side and quite bloodthirsty.
  • Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. Creeping Derangea causes flowers to grow under the skin and then break out. Painful, but it only infects people under 20. Initially.
  • The Suffering has quite a bit of this, especially as the enemies are all personifications of different methods of execution: The Festers, for example, represent those left to die aboard a beached slave ship, and are constantly being eaten from within by rats. Occasionally, these bloated corpses will open their bellies and let a swarm of live rats pour out to attack anyone in the area.
    • Mainliners (representing lethal injection) are in constant pain due to all the lethal chemicals in their veins- as if the stunted limbs and syringed eyeballs weren't bad enough.
    • Torque's transformation into his monster form in which his head appears to briefly turn inside out and his eyes vanish behind skin.
      • In the sequel, the transformations are more intense, depending on how far down the Karma Meter Torque is. The worst involves Torque's skin hardening into bony plates covered in sharp spines.
    • At one point in the sequel, a guard is briefly heard screaming over the radio about being sliced in the stomach and that something is "pulling itself inside" him.
    • The Creeper's weapons of choice, namely the bodies of his prostitute victims, bonded to his stomach and made into Combat Tentacles. Oh, and apparently, being absorbed by this guy is the fate of any woman in the game he doesn't decide to gut immediately.
    • And the Festers? According to their entry in Clem's journal they might actually be the spirit of the slave-traders as opposed to the slaves they left to die on the ship.
  • Villains and protagonist alike of Prototype fall into this. The protagonist also has the same "charming" feeding habits as Aptom.
  • Rakghoulsc in Knights of the Old Republic; here's the Wookieepedia article. In their first appearance, they're somewhere between zombies and werewolves; bitten humans have a chance of being infected and transforming if not cured. They shamble on all fours and balance on their hind legs like nonhuman apes, their eyes have been moved to the sides and squeezed shut, their skins are either a shiny off white or a rough red; altogether they're just monstrous. Rakghouls are essentially ravenous animals.
  • True Assassin in Fate/stay night enters the world by eating his way out of the fake Assassin. Who is still conscious and chatting with it. There's a little too much detail about said event, plus the implication that however inhuman True Assassin looks later he is much less so when he first shows up. Couple other examples: Shinji being attached to a faulty Grail and becoming a mutant lump of expanding flesh and Shirou's body turning into swords. No, it is not nearly as cool as it sounds, that's why it's on this page. ...Well, okay, it's cool, but it's definitely not a good thing at all and if they had illustrated the final result it would have been rather creepy.
    • Finally Zouken rebuilds his form each time his old body breaks down by infecting and fleshcrafting some new victim with his worms.
    • On a related note, Sakura's Crest Worm, which, throughout the Heaven's Feel route steadily drives her insane.
    • There's also Rider's Noble Phantasm, Blood Fort Andromeda, which slowly dissolves everyone inside its area of effect into blood. First their skin melts off, followed by the rest of their flesh, and the bodies are merged together while they are still alive until they are finally absorbed completely. People close enough to the origin of the effect will have all their blood instantly vaporized.
    • And then there's the way Kotomine provides prana for Gilgamesh...
  • In Fate/hollow ataraxia Caren Ortensia's body reacts to the presence of evil spirits by having spikes erupt from her skin.
  • The Unclean Beast of Demigod. Grotesque as it looks, you also have to remember that this...thing...grew inside a human womb. An ordinary woman had to carry and give birth to this, completely ignorant as to what was growing inside of her.
  • Some of the bosses of Survival Crisis Z are this, including a giant zombie covered in mutant maggots and an Infected with spider limbs for a head.
  • Captain Blood is too old a videogame to evoke actual feelings of body horror, but the novella included in the manual, explaining the premise of the game, more than makes up for it. The main character of the game is a game programmer named Bob Morlock, who proceeds to create a space exploration game so realistic, it becomes real. Bob is teleported aboard the organic spaceship he created, where he is accidendally cloned 30 times after a hyperspace jump. The book then explains in detail how Bob's organs start shutting down because of the "vital fluid" he lost when he was cloned, and he needs to replace them by mechanical substitutes, gradually turning into a robot. But that is only a temporary remedy, because the goal of the game (stopping Bob's body degeneration) can only be achieved by killing all the other clones and absorbing their vital fluid.
  • Though the ordinary Infecteds, Hunters, and (for the most part) Witches in Left 4 Dead probably don't experience much body horror, it's pretty Squicky to imagine what it must be like to watch the formation of a Smoker, Boomer, or Tank.
    • Left 4 Dead 2 gives us the spitter, jockey, and charger...
      • According to the commentary in Left 4 Dead 2 one of the developers had a "nightmare" folder on his computer with reference photos of people with horrible diseases for reference for making infected. These were so bad that not a single one of them was used as reference for the game.
  • In Clive Barker's Undying, Bethany got her final revenge on her brother Aaron by chaining him inside her private dungeon and letting rats eat him alive, removing his jawbone so he can't scream.
    • Which also qualifies as You Fail Biology Forever, since removing someone's jawbone does not affect his ability to scream - the vocal cords should be removed for it. As a matter of fact, he could probably do nothing but scream.
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has the horribly disfiguring disease known as Corprus. Take a look at these things, and bear in mind that all of them used to be human.
  • In the Fallout series, ghouls are humans that got lethal doses of radiation but didn't have the good fortune to die. Also, the supermutants were all once human but were exposed to a forced evolution virus. The big bad of the first game The Master fell into a vat of the stuff and by the time the vault dweller meets him he is merged into a computer.
    • Just look at Harold. In the first game, he looks like an ordinary ghoul. In the second, he has a tree branch growing out of his head. In the third, the tree branch grew into a full-sized tree, trapping Harold inside and shuffling his organs around in it's root system.
  • Mass Effect has Husks - organics captured by the Geth are put onto devices that impale them, replaces their organs with cybernetics and they are effectively turned into cyber-zombies. Also, during the final boss fight Saren's corpse is re-animated into an avatar of Sovereign in gruesome detail.
    • Also of note is the background of Dr. Saleon, as told by Garrus. People were used as living incubators for clone organs, and if the organs were bad, why, the good doctor would just leave them in.
    • It gets worse in Mass Effect 2. After all, you get Abominations, which are Husks that glow red and explode; Scions, which are three humans fused horribly togther; and Praetorians, tanks made from 30 people fused together and powered by dozens of severed human heads. Plus, the Collectors themselves...
      • When you find a dead Collector on the Collector Ship, EDI determines that the Collectors are Protheans. However, these Protheans show signs of "extensive genetic rewrite," including three missing chromosomes, plus extensive cybernetic modification. If you ask Mordin after the mission if he thinks the Collectors can be saved, he says "No minds, replaced by tech. No digestive tract, replaced by tech. No souls, replaced by tech!"
      • Then you find out that this is how new Reapers are made.
    • In the Overlord DLC, the creature known as the Rogue VI turns out to be an autistic mathematical savant was forcibly integrated into the geth neural network by his Mad Scientist brother to see if the geth could be controlled.
    • Shepard gets in on this - have seen what he does to Dr Amanda Kenson's arm?
  • The Affliction in Guild Wars: Factions, a plague which initially makes those afflicted go mad and attack anybody who themselves is not afflicted, and shortly after rather violently turn into a body horror. The affliction is later revealed to be the work of Shiro Tagachi (a spirit of incredible strength who 200 years prior had killed the Emperor of Cantha, of whom he was the Bodyguard) who was abusing the powers granted him in the afterlife, creating the afflicted instead of guiding newly dead souls to the underworld as part of his plan to return to life.
    • This happens slowly to Varesh Ossa, whose close tie to Abaddon and his minions caused her first to go bald while developing ridges on her forehead. On death, those ridges transformed into extra eyes as she was resurrected as a Margonite.
  • In Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh the main character has hallucinations of a purple clawed hand emerging from his stomach. in one of the possible endings his hand is also shown mutating, having earlier discovered a Tomato in the Mirror.
  • In Star Fox Assault, Pigma undergoes a horrific transformation at the hands of the Aparoids, in which he is assimilated into a spacecraft, turning his whole body into a giant, mutilated, vaguely cybernetic (but mostly organic-looking) pig's face, kept safe in a metallic cube which can open and close, hiding or revealing said face. He then later shows up in Command in an alternate, still pretty weird form - But fortunately, it's much less creepy (And Easier to defeat).
  • Dragon Age features something like this with the abominations. While the player isn't given a chance to witness the transformation due to a glow effect, the way demons take over mages in the game universe results in a rather gruesome version of a human (or elf).
    • Worse yet is the Broodmother boss fight later, which lets the player know before fighting it that the gigantic Nightmare Fuel boss was once a dwarf woman. This transformation is given as the explicit purpose for which the darkspawn even abduct mortal women rather than killing every last of them.
  • In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the Colossus of Atlantis is introduced as a machine that was used to transform humans into gods; unfortunately, judging by the hideously deformed bones scattered throughout Atlantis, there were several failed attempts before Nur-Ab-Sal got it right. But even in light of this, Klaus Kerner attempted to use the Colossus on himself during the climax, believing that his Aryan genes would make him immune to that sort of thing. Needless to say, he's proven very wrong: after a brief moment of glory, his left eye swells until it's forced shut, then he begins shrinking rapidly until he's transformed into a twisted little minotaur.
  • In the surreal Russian game The Void, the cast of beautiful, naked and uncensored "sisters" are complemented by the absolutely horrifying, disgusting flesh and metal abomination "brothers". 'Mantid', as one example, is a quadruple amputee who has various rusted metal protrusions sticking out of him haphazardly, two of which he uses to walk around on as giant, twisted stilts. It is far worse then it sounds.
  • For being such a light-hearted game otherwise, there's a particularly jarring example in Pikmin 2. "Bulbmin" can be found in certain dungeons, and at first appear to be nothing more than dwarf Bulborbs with a single leaf growing out of their back. Then you look up their entry in the Piklopedia after completing the dungeon and discover that the actual Bulbmin is the leaf itself, a parasitic life form that grafts itself into the bulborb's nervous system through its spinal cord, and controls its actions while the host is still living and concious. * shudder*
  • I seem to remember that the Zerg from StarCraft can "infest" a Terran by infecting him or her with some sort of virus. This turns that Terran into this. With the exception of Lieutenant Sarah Kerrigan and a few others, most infested Terran are deemed next to worthless by the Swarm, and as such are simply made explosive. Despite the fact that their lifespan is really short, because they are suicidal bombs, they seem to revel in it. Kerrigan most of all.
    • In second game it got worse.
    • In the first game the Zerg Queen could also produce Broodlings, spores that would consume any biological matter (read: living Human or Protoss) before exploding out of their incubator, instantly killing said unit.
  • The Harvesters/Ithkul from Master of Orion 3 behave similarly to the Zerg, infecting other races and...reconfiguring...their bodies into freakish shapes. Here (most of the way down the page) you can see some Ithkul - two infected humans, and what appears to be an infected Meklar (yes, they can infect robots too)!
  • In the in game cinematic for the Wrathgate, a glimpse of what the plague does is seen as an NPC is briefly seen on his knees clutching his head through his helmet, as is face is MELTING.
    • The Curse of Flesh is this from the perspective of everyone not already afflicted with it. Trustworthy, enduring metal being replaced with easily corruptible flesh by the will of an Eldritch Abomination, an ever-dying, malfunctioning travesty of one's intended self. Of course, the horror tends to be lost on players, since it already turned them into, among others, humans.
    • Also from World of Warcraft, the Worgen transformation sequence may constitute Body Horror for some players (the character, starting as human, stares in apparent horror as his limbs turn wolflike, then screams and holds his head as the rest of him transforms).
    • The raid boss Razorscale may be considered this, although unless you did several quests in The Storm Peaks it may be lost on you. The Proto-Dragon Veranus was captured by Loken. Then Loken fused metal plates completely across her body and, judging from her model, completely replaced several parts of her body to create a "Plated Dragon".
    • Similar to Razorscale, Deathwing has been artificially covered with metal plates while in hiding. In this case, however, it's to prevent his molten lava interior from just spraying out everywhere.
  • In Mega Man Zero 4, the genocidal Big Bad Dr. Weil is revealed to have his mind trapped in a self-regenerating mechanical suit of armor, which, in theory, makes him "immortal". When The Dragon, Craft, rebels, destroying Weil's base of operations with the Ragnarok satellite, apparently taking care of Weil. That is, until the end of the game, where we see Weil actually survived, and his regenerative armor decaying but still functioning, showing robotic parts meshed with his flesh. Not something to be shown to kids... And then there's his One-Winged Angel, where his armor, but not himself, grows to enormous size. It's obviously a Painful Transformation, as Weil screams during the whole phase, not to mention all the blood.
  • Scott Pilgrim, or at least the video game adaptation, has an homage to the Akira example above. In the boss fight with Todd Ingram, one of his attacks involves jumping to one side of the screen as his arm mutates, then thrusting his arm at you as it turns into a gigantic writhing mass of fangs and tentacles. However, since Todd's power is derived from his veganism, the arm also contains mutated versions of various vegetables. It might make it worse that Todd has a Slasher Smile during the whole attack.
  • In the Command & Conquer Tiberium storyline this is what prolonged tiberium exposure has done at some points. It has gone from merely killing infantry, to turning them into huge moving agressive meat-blobs, to crystalizing them while they still live.
  • Most of the ghosts in Fatal Frame fit this trope. Broken Neck from the first game is a particularly memorable example.
    • Not to mention the Blinded Ghost. "My eyes! Give me back my eyes!"
  • At first glance, the Pokémon franchise doesn't seem to fit this trope since most evolutions occur in the span of 30 seconds, until you realize how drastic the changes of those evolutions are in only the span of 30 seconds, it starts becoming more Nightmare Fuel. To put it simply, many evolutions involve the sudden introduction of new elemental types, suddenly growing and swelling to sometimes over double the Pokémon's original size, and many evolutions from originally cute creatures suddenly alter their personality into being aggressive and sometimes even disastrously violent.
    • One particularly horrific example is Munchlax's evolution into Snorlax. Munchlax starts as a cute little Pokémon at 2 feet tall and a husky 231.5lbs and in the span of 30 seconds balloons into a beast that is three times as tall, and over four times as heavy at a half ton in weight!
    • Parasect. An animal being eaten inside out and mind controlled by a parasitic plant.
    • Seismitoad. A frog that pops the misshapen orbs and bones in its back so hard it quakes the ground.
    • And then in the real life department, there's some of the animals that the pokemon are based off of. Once again, Seismitoad.
  • Disney's Epic Mickey, of all things, involves Mickey himself having parts of him melt and drip...upward. Not to mention the ability to use paint thinner to dissolve your enemies and melt npcs into little puddle people (this isn't a sanctioned part of gameplay, but it's really funny). There are also dismembered cyborg versions of Goofy, Daisy, and Donald.
  • The main plot of Agent USA consists of fighting against an experiment with a TV set which had Gone Horribly Wrong and is now turning every citizen of the United States into mindless, walking TV static. The worst part is that this can happen to your character, and instead of ending the game, you just wander aimlessly forever, having lost your mind and turned into fuzz.
  • In the finale of Dragon Age II, First Enchanter Orsino snaps after seeing so many of his fellow mages slaughtered by the Templars. Having crossed the Despair Event Horizon and wishing for nothing but revenge, he sacrifices his principles and his humanity (technically he's an elf but still) by using Blood Magic to merge with the corpses of the fallen mages to become a Harvester flesh golem.
  • In Valkyrie Profile, a young princess is force-fed a poison called "Ghoul Powder", which transforms her into a demon and causes her to kill three soldiers. The worst part is that when she's killing one of the soldiers mid-transformation, her innocent, conscious mind is still aware. Not for the easily squeamish.
  • Portal features an energy field at the end of most test chambers, called the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill, which dissolves any unauthorized material that's carried through it. While this does not include you and your portal device, GLaDOS is careful to mention that, "on semi-rare occasions", the Grill may emancipate "dental fillings, tooth enamel, and teeth". Yowch.
  • Portal 2 ups the ante, all played for Black Comedy of course.
    • It starts with a Call Back to the first game; when the automated announcer is explaining the purpose of the Emancipation Grill, it mentions that it "may have emancipated the ear tubes inside your head".
    • It also manages Body Horror with purely synthetic entities. The "Frankenturrets" in Chapter 8 are a sadistic mashup of a Weighted Storage Cube and a pair of turrets, which hop around pathetically like a crippled robotic hermit crab and make noises that somehow manage to convey their horror at their own existence. To make it worse, they are intelligent enough to be fried by a Logic Bomb.
    • As bad as the synthetic body horrors are, they pale in comparison to the implied ones you hear about from the pre-recorded messages down in Old Aperture. Seriously, if Cave Johnson felt it important enough to put on a recording, nine times out of ten he's describing the result of some Mad Science experiment the test subjects would have just had performed on them, often simply for the sake of science. These things include having their urine turned to coal, their blood turned to gasoline, being irradiated to cause tumors to grow, being teleported without their skin, having their bones dissolved, or being mutated by praying mantis DNA.
  • Of all things, Mother 3 has the various Chimeras. They range from standard, somewhat silly Mix-and-Match Critters to some...very disturbing combinations. The colorful, cartoony graphics don't help.
  • Dwarf Fortress, being Dwarf Fortress, features this. The most prominent example would be the Kitten Rot, one of the many possible Forgotten Beast syndrome. As the name implies, it causes the skin of the infected to completely rot off, leaving behind a horrible mass of living miasma. In its most basic form.
    • The worst part? If your medical staff is skilled enough, the afflicted may actually survive having their entire skin rotted off.
    • Dwarf Fortress players being dwarf fortress players, this has of course been weaponised. Forgotten beast that rots the nervous systems of your dwarves, leaving them completely numb? Well, looks like you've just got a way to make your military immune to pain! (also, dwarves without eyes are said to make excellent siege operators, since they don't run away from enemies even though they're civilians)
  • There are multiple layers of this to the ultimate villain in Thief: Deadly Shadows. You learn fairly early on that there's SOMETHING that's acting as a bogeyman in The City, reputedly having murdered people (leaving variously mutilated corpses behind, sometimes only blood stains). That's bad, but near the end of the game, you encounter a ghost of a victim who has been trapped as a ghost by The Hag for unknown reasons. Freeing her unmasks The Hag, who is, among other things, a Skin Thief and can wear the appearance of a victim she had suitably prepared. Her actual form is a vaguely-humanoid mass of flesh, eyes, and mouths, most of which do not appear to be operating under The Hag's control.
    • There are also the remains of the former inmates of the orphanage that was also an insane asylum (AT THE SAME TIME). They mostly scrabble around, and you can get an unfortunately good look at them if you're careful enough. They look like concept art for a new Cenobite.
    • Thief II: The Metal Age gives us the Servants. The look like some kind of cleverly build robots. Underneath the masks and suits are mutilated vagrants, prostitutes, and others deemed as 'scum' by the villains. Their existence is so horrific that some of the THANK YOU when you kill them.
    • Thief II also brings us the Rust Gas. This hideous bioweapon reduces any organic material it touches to something resembling rust, and it will grow until it runs out of organic matter to consume.
  • The Egg-burdened in Dark Souls. These poor guys have giant eggs growing out of their backs that are so heavy and huge that they can't even walk and are reduced to crawling. Despite this, most of them actually don't mind their situation seeing it as proof of their devotion to the mutated Daughters of Chaos. Many of them also carry Egg Vermifuges which can cure their condition -- it's entirely their choice. If you make one hostile, it will attack you and plant an egg in your neck that will eventually cover your entire head. It's actually in your best interest to do this at least once, since the Egg-burdened npc Eingyi will interpret your condition as a sign of devotion to the Fair Lady. He will then offer you an Egg Vermifuge and sell you the forbidden Pyromancies that the other Pyromancers exiled him for creating.
  • In Ancient Domains of Mystery, the corrupting radiation, slowly affecting the inhabitants of the world, causes several stages of mutations. These include ten extra eyes, gaining poisonous hands and the transformation of feet into hooves, just to name a few. These have an actual effect on gameplay. Becoming too corrupted will eventually dissolve you into a pile of pure Chaos.
  • In Wax Works, one of the levels is a mineshaft overran with plant mutants. Getting killed by one of these will result in a very nasty game over screen.
  • Pandoras Tower: Go ahead. Try putting off giving Elena the cure for her curse 'till the last minute. You will never sleep again.
  • Many of the chimeric monsters in Monster Girl Quest. Examples include the Chimera Dryad and Chimera Dryad Vore, which resemble human women with plants sprouting from all over their flesh.
  • Monster Girl Quest Paradox includes every example from the original game, and adds the Apoptosis monsters. They are combinations of human, animal and/or mechanical parts, often with little sense of unity.
  • On a related note, the texture maps for most every 3D character are pretty grotesque when taken out of context.
    • When viewed separately from the polygonal character model, the texture map makes the character look really fat.
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