Skip to main content
GamesRadar+ GamesRadar+ GamesRadar+ The Games, Movies, TV & Comics You Love
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
flag of UK
UK
flag of US
US
flag of Canada
Canada
flag of Australia
Australia
  • Games
  • TV
  • Movies
  • Hardware
  • Video
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Guides
  • Deals
  • More
    • PS5
    • Xbox Series X
    • Nintendo Switch
    • Nintendo Switch 2
    • PC
    • Platforms
    • Tabletop Gaming
    • Comics
    • Toys & Collectibles
    • SFX
    • Newsarama
    • Retro Gamer
    • Newsletters
    • About us
    • Features
Total Film
Gaming Magazines
Gaming Magazines
Why subscribe?
  • Subscribe from just £3
  • Takes you closer to the games, movies and TV you love
  • Try a single issue or save on a subscription
  • Issues delivered straight to your door or device
From$12
View
Trending
  • Prime Day Deals
  • Superman
  • Donkey Kong Bananza
  • Switch 2 stock
Recommended reading
No Man's Sky
Open World Games Hello Games boss joins No Man's Sky community saluting the end of one fan's permadeath run: "All I can do is sit in my ship, watch the lightning storms, and wait for my oxygen to run out"
Oblivion Remastered
The Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered player absolutely dunks on the Dark Brotherhood's most annoying target with a parkour kill that would put Assassin's Creed to shame
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 combat
RPGs Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 master laughs in the face of the RPG's challenge modifiers, as not even the game's toughest boss with 100 times more health can withstand 1.4 trillion damage
Final Destination Bloodlines
Horror Movies New Final Destination Bloodlines footage shows how the film executed what fans are calling "the most traumatizing death of the whole movie," and it's highly impressive
Resident Evil Village
Games The 25 best video game villains you just love to hate
The sandworm in Dune: Awakening
MMO Games As Dune: Awakening celebrates 1 million players, Funcom reveals an unforgiving 816,720 deaths to Shai-Hulud and over 6 billion grams of Spice consumed by fans of the survival MMO
The Last of Us season 2 episode 2
Sci-Fi Shows Pedro Pascal has a remarkably cheerful response to his brutally heartbreaking scene in the latest episode of The Last of Us season 2
  1. Games

Gaming's most beautiful deaths

Features
By Alan Bradley published 4 January 2016

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Death is beautiful

Death is beautiful

Video games are like a prism. When you shine certain ideas through them you get a kaleidoscopic effect, often exciting, occasionally uplifting, sometimes depressing. Historically, the majority of concepts we've seen refracted through video games are ones like 'combat' or 'power fantasy', but as the medium becomes democratized, we're getting a richer and richer panoply of themes and images and messages. Games as a medium are uniquely versatile and flexible, and it's nice to see artists capitalize on that nearly unlimited potential to express and engage, provoke deep thought and genuine feeling.

To celebrate games growing up and spreading out, I wanted to look at what happens when you shine denser, more complex ideas through them, and there are few ideas I could think of more tangled with meaning than beauty and death.

Spoilers ahead for games from the previous console generation or earlier.

Page 1 of 7
Page 1 of 7
Aerith (Final Fantasy 7)

Aerith (Final Fantasy 7)

One of the most famous deaths in video game history, Aerith's is also one of the earliest examples of a main character's demise having any real emotional resonance. For a lot of gamers, Aerith's death was transformative, changing death from a temporary obstacle to a meaningful plot device. Suddenly, video game characters were mortal, vulnerable the way characters in other media were.

All the phoenix down and restorative magic on the planet couldn't save Aerith, and her demise, beyond being a tragic, beautiful moment, prompted important conversations about the player's role in storytelling and character death. It's a conversation we're still having today, debating the importance of player agency versus the license of storytellers to shape events, and the catalyst for much of it was one blow from Sephiroth's sword.

Page 2 of 7
Page 2 of 7
The white phosphorus incident (Spec Ops: The Line)

The white phosphorus incident (Spec Ops: The Line)

If you missed Spec Ops, that surprising 2012 gem, the white phosphorus incident occurs when your squad encounters a superior enemy force while en route to an objective. Pinned down and outgunned, the squad resorts to white phosphorus, a real-world incendiary used in mortar shells, grenades, and other weaponry which burns on contact with the air and melts flesh to the bone. After repeatedly shelling the enemy through the lens of a black and white targetting camera, you discover that some of your targets were civilian refugees, packed into a narrow trench where the concentrated phosphorus was impossible to escape and burned them alive.

It might seem cold, calling the horrific deaths of countless innocents beautiful, but beauty is a broad term. It encompasses moments that terrify and disturb us as well as those that enlighten and elevate, and games are uniquely positioned to give us a taste of this nightmare facet of beauty. Watching passively as a horrific act is committed in film or reading about it in a novel is intense, but it doesn't compare to being placed in a situation where you are unwittingly committing those acts yourself. This transgressive sabotage on the part of the developers is beautiful because it exposes the real horror of modern, impersonal war in a way that's deeply affecting, and because of its capacity to shake even the most jaded consumer of violent media. As the cutscene that revealed the civilians charred bodies rolled, I found myself thinking about the detachment of killing real human beings by targeting them on a glass screen the way an operator of a white phosphorus weapon would. I couldn't help but draw a very uncomfortable parallel to the detachment I experience killing fictional people in games, and wonder at how modern military technology is dehumanizing the 'enemy'.

Page 3 of 7
Page 3 of 7
Sacrifice (Fable 2)

Sacrifice (Fable 2)

Death is one of the most common and effective tropes for wrenching emotion out of an audience, and it's easy to feel exploited as a player/reader/viewer if it's done cheaply or if the emotion the creator is trying to inspire feels unearned. On the flipside, when executed well a character's death can convey so much about the human condition, our connection to others, our inescapable mortality. Fable 2, and the final choice the player makes to sacrifice their beloved dog and family or to trade them for the the lives of countless, faceless thousands, somehow manages to be both: cheap AND effective.

On the one hand, making the culmination of such an epic journey a binary (technically trinary, but no one takes the gold) choice robs it of some dramatic weight. But on the other hand, that choice is a thoughtfully conceived one, and it showcases the sort of decision-making that is so rare in gaming but that makes Fable 2 so outstanding. When I reached this decision myself, I set the controller aside and really pondered. It made me consider how I'd react to this scenario in real life, the 'trolley problem' of video games: would I save a handful of my loved ones at the expense of condemning thousands of innocents to death? Giving players moments like that in a format notorious for its mindlessness is beautiful, yes, but even more importantly it lights the way for video games as a medium to mature.

Page 4 of 7
Page 4 of 7
Lee (The Walking Dead)

Lee (The Walking Dead)

Courage is beautiful. Sacrifice is beautiful. And yes, tragedy and sorrow are beautiful, or they can be, when they're portrayed with sympathy and skill. Lee's death in The Walking Dead is a master class in all of these, taking a moment that could easily be infuriating, gruesome, or just deeply depressing, and making it instead poignant and powerfully real.

Missing a limb, on the brink of changing into a mindless husk, Lee (and by proxy, the player) must choose whether to suffer a slow, wasting death, or force his doe eyed child ward Clementine to shoot him in the head and end his suffering. After coming through so much in five trying, wrenching, incredible chapters, watching Lee die and pass his survivor's legacy on to Clem is one of the most moving moments in video game history. It's also a moment that could only happen in video games, because it's replete with player choice, the culmination of hours of investing in a character that you're controlling and guiding, who's been your stand-in and avatar, but who simultaneously feels fully realized and very human.

Page 5 of 7
Page 5 of 7
Megaton (Fallout 3)

Megaton (Fallout 3)

Megaton, the first real settlement you're likely to encounter in Fallout 3, is a nice little town, as postapocalyptic towns go. The people are mostly friendly, there's work to be had if you want it, and for a little scratch you can find some passable food and a warm bed for the night. Sure, some of the people are quirky, maybe a little gruff, but you'd expect some rough edges given the situation, and there's some real heart in Megaton. And that's exactly why nuking it off the face of the planet is so satisfying.

Blowing up Megaton (with the unexploded nuclear bomb that serves as the town's namesake) is a terrible act, really deeply evil stuff, and there's no amount of rationalizing or equivocating that's going to justify it. But it feels incredible. Watching that mushroom cloud of nuclear fire rise in the distance, knowing that you've forever changed the shape of the Capital Wasteland, is one of the most empowering moments I've ever experienced playing a video game.There's something terrifyingly exhilarating about touching a single button and destroying so many lives and cratering an entire city, and the experience of actually transforming a setting through your actions was still quite novel at the time of Fallout 3's release. Afterwards, of course, there are the faint whispers of regret somewhere in the back of your mind, especially when you see how the town's friendliest resident has been hideously mutated. But in that beautiful moment when the wasteland is darkened by a blast cloud of superheated ash, it's 100% worth it.

Page 6 of 7
Page 6 of 7
John Marston (Red Dead Redemption)

John Marston (Red Dead Redemption)

The end of Red Dead Redemption seems custom made for an article like this. "Is death beautiful?" it seems to ask, as you watch John Marston, father, husband, conflicted antihero, gunned down in a brutal ambush just when he thought he'd escaped his bloody, mercenary past.

Death is beautiful, or it can be, when it's buoyed by grand ideas, when it represents something, when it's not just the futile, empty coda of a wasted life. Or maybe it's beautiful even if it is that latter thing, when it shows us that sometimes life is cruel and banal and happy endings are a fantasy. John Marston's death gives us both, grand ideas like the sharp teeth of the inescapable past and the fact that a violent life is a prison that kills, but also the tragedy of meaninglessness, reaching a goal and finding peace only to discover that it's an illusion concealing the business end of a revolver. Is death beautiful? Yes. But that doesn't make it hurt any less.

Page 7 of 7
Page 7 of 7
Alan Bradley
Alan Bradley
Social Links Navigation

Alan Bradley was once a Hardware Writer for GamesRadar and PC Gamer, specialising in PC hardware. But, Alan is now a freelance journalist. He has bylines at Rolling Stone, Gamasutra, Variety, and more. 

See more Games Features
Read more
No Man's Sky
Hello Games boss joins No Man's Sky community saluting the end of one fan's permadeath run: "All I can do is sit in my ship, watch the lightning storms, and wait for my oxygen to run out"
Oblivion Remastered
Oblivion Remastered player absolutely dunks on the Dark Brotherhood's most annoying target with a parkour kill that would put Assassin's Creed to shame
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 combat
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 master laughs in the face of the RPG's challenge modifiers, as not even the game's toughest boss with 100 times more health can withstand 1.4 trillion damage
Final Destination Bloodlines
New Final Destination Bloodlines footage shows how the film executed what fans are calling "the most traumatizing death of the whole movie," and it's highly impressive
Resident Evil Village
The 25 best video game villains you just love to hate
The sandworm in Dune: Awakening
As Dune: Awakening celebrates 1 million players, Funcom reveals an unforgiving 816,720 deaths to Shai-Hulud and over 6 billion grams of Spice consumed by fans of the survival MMO
Latest in Games
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Bethesda "lore master" of 29 years would've made The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion weirder like Morrowind, but The Lord of the Rings was king, and Todd Howard "gravitates not towards the weird stuff"
Helldivers 2
"I know what's coming for Helldivers for the next few years": Arrowhead has a long-term plan for Helldivers 2, but it's still "subject to change"
a dude with a beard and a crow on his shoulder
After gaining players for 7 years, sci-fi colony builder RimWorld hits a new Steam record, nearing 100,000 concurrents thanks to an expansion so big it probably could've been a new game
The Elder Scrolls 6
After nearly 30 years buried in Bethesda lore, ex-dev isn't sure what to make of The Elder Scrolls 6: "They're making something different than what I would have done, and so I don't know how I'm going to feel"
Kassandra holding a falcon on her arm during Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Ubisoft foresaw the grindy fate of Assassin's Creed Valhalla back in the Odyssey days, wanting a literal "odyssey" but not "a world that was just fatiguing to travel through"
Borderlands 4 Bandit mask
"A massive win for media preservation": Dedicated Borderlands fans have finally "made it into Borderlands Online," months since the project to revive the long-dead MMO began
Latest in Features
Laezel BG3 evil ending
After 2 years, I've renewed my love for turn-based RPGs with these 5 games like Baldur's Gate 3 I can't stop recommending
A screenshot of Total War: Warhammer 3 showing grave guard soldiers jumping out of a siege tower beneath a grey sky
After 2,537 hours of playing Total War: Warhammer, I'm almost ready to say goodbye to Creative Assembly's best strategy series
Fallout: New Vegas
I'm going back to the five best post-apocalyptic games I ever played, thanks to Death Stranding 2 giving me a taste for the terrible
The Sims 4 Enchanted by Nature fairy
After 2000 hours of creating a fantasy save file in The Sims, I've decided to rank all 8 Sims 4 occults, including the new Enchanted by Nature's fairies
Photo by Rosalie Newcombe of the FuRyu Hatsune Miku noodle stopper figure, sitting in front of the Asus TUF Gaming collection.
The Asus TUF Gaming x Hatsune Miku collab as awoken the 15 year old Vocaloid fangirl within me
David Corenswet as Superman with Krypto the dog and a robot in the Fortress of Solitude.
James Gunn's Superman has finally found the cure to superhero movie fatigue: just make them more like comics
  1. Zion Wright grinds along a wooden balustrade in in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4's San Francisco level
    1
    Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 review: "A nostalgic, must-play hit for fans"
  2. 2
    College Football 26 review: “Thanks to rivalries and dynasty, this is the greatest show on turf”
  3. 3
    Mecha Break review: "This mech battler makes up for lacking customization with a varied roster that lets me live out my Evangelion fantasy"
  4. 4
    Death Stranding 2: On the Beach review: "This tarpunk delivery epic is more Metal Gear Solid than ever, for better and worse"
  5. 5
    Rematch review: "As with Rocket League, the just-one-more-game pull is magnetic"
  1. David Corenswet as Superman inside the Fortress of Solitude in James Gunn's Superman.
    1
    Superman review: "A triumphant reinvention and a promising start for the DCU"
  2. 2
    Jurassic World Rebirth Review: "An unscary sequel that needed a little more time in amber"
  3. 3
    M3GAN 2.0 review: "A bold sequel with a slightly underwhelming conclusion"
  4. 4
    28 Years Later Review: "Enough terror, splatter and suspense to satisfy”
  5. 5
    Predator: Killer of Killers review: "Great characters, thrilling action, and gorgeous Arcane-esque animation"
  1. Lee Jung-jae as Gi-hun in Squid Game season 3
    1
    Squid Game season 3 review: "A staggeringly excellent final season wraps up one of the greatest Netflix shows ever"
  2. 2
    Ironheart review: "A relic of Marvel's content-at-all-costs era"
  3. 3
    Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 review: "The show's most assured run of episodes to date"
  4. 4
    Doctor Who season 2, episode 8 spoiler review: 'The Reality War' is "a mix of the good, the bad, and the truly baffling"
  5. 5
    Doctor Who season 2, episode 7 spoiler review: 'Wish World' is "an exciting and ambitious" start to the season finale, with hints of WandaVision

GamesRadar+ is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Advertise with us
  • Review guidelines
  • Write for us
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait...