Skip to main content
GamesRadar+ GamesRadar+ The Games, Movies, TV & Comics You Love
flag of UK
UK
flag of US
US
flag of Canada
Canada
flag of Australia
Australia
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
  • 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
Subscribe now
Trending
  • Gamescom 2025 schedule
  • Gamescom
  • Battlefield 6
  • New Games for 2025
Don't miss these
Death Stranding 2
Action Games Not even Dollman's constant "guilt-tripping" and the pressure of social media was enough to stop this Death Stranding 2 player from spending an hour hauling a worryingly large pile of dead bodies "for science"
Elden Ring Nightreign
Roguelike Games Elden Ring Nightreign players sick of Everdark Augur boss can't even pretend to be sad there's a glitch that makes it jump off the edge of the map: "Nightlord felled… off the map"
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
Silent Hill 2
Horror Games Players debate characters' looks in everything from Marvel Rivals to The Witcher 3, but Silent Hill 2 devs sent them a warning 24 years ago: "Maria was sexier when we first started out, but her plunging neckline gave us too many technical problems"
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
Grace Ashcroft looks at a computer in Resident Evil Requiem screenshot
Games Everything announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2025
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
RPGs Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's gut-wrenching early twist started as a joke from an abandoned game, but the director greenlit it immediately: "I think it's very important for the themes"
ben starr dressed in harequinn makeup chomping down on a banana
Horror Games New Pocketpair-published horror game turns Balatro's live-action Jimbo actor into a jester again, devs insist it's "accidental," really: "No one will believe that we genuinely didn't mean to do this"
lea seydoux as fragile smoking a cigarette
Games Hideo Kojima learned "so many ways to kill people" in training, says it's "kind of sad" many devs "don't know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun" despite making military games
Gods, Death & Reapers
Action RPGs Accept Death's invitation to team up and restore balance to shattered realms in Gods, Death & Reapers
Valor Mortis boss fight with giant red hand
Action Games "We aren't trying to make a game for everyone": Dev knows its first-person Soulslike is weird, says it's "much closer to Dark Souls" but "we love Dishonored and it has definitely influenced us"
Actor Neil Newbon as Chase, a character in Dead Take standing in front of a camera with a red overlay and horizontal digitized lines.
Horror Games I thought the scariest thing about Dead Take would be its Final Fantasy and Baldur's Gate 3 stars doing American accents, but no horror game has stunned me like this since 2022
Baldur's Gate 3 pale vampire elf Astarion, a man with curly white hair and red eyes
Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 player tragically loses 50-hour Honor Mode save in Act 3 to some rain that Larian added in just to screw with us: "Hate my favorite game so much"
  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
Death Stranding 2
Not even Dollman's constant "guilt-tripping" and the pressure of social media was enough to stop this Death Stranding 2 player from spending an hour hauling a worryingly large pile of dead bodies "for science"
Elden Ring Nightreign
Elden Ring Nightreign players sick of Everdark Augur boss can't even pretend to be sad there's a glitch that makes it jump off the edge of the map: "Nightlord felled… off the map"
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
Silent Hill 2
Players debate characters' looks in everything from Marvel Rivals to The Witcher 3, but Silent Hill 2 devs sent them a warning 24 years ago: "Maria was sexier when we first started out, but her plunging neckline gave us too many technical problems"
Resident Evil Village
The 25 best video game villains you just love to hate
Latest in Games
Borderlands 4 Harlow character close up holding a detonator
Borderlands 4 endgame and post-launch roadmap revealed: You can start new characters at level 30 after beating the campaign, there are weekly challenges, and the first story pack is "cosmic horror" with "a bloodier, darker tone"
Beaten Path
This Final Fantasy Tactics-inspired indie strategy RPG with anime fish and lizard people was fully funded on Kickstarter in less than a week, and after that banger of an elevator pitch, are we even surprised?
Three wizards in colorful robes, surrounded by monsters, in the box art for Magicka
Helldivers 2 creative director wishes he could make a sequel to the chaotic co-op game that launched Arrowhead, but returning to it "scares" him: "I would like to do it at some point though"
Battlefield 6 multiplayer screenshot
After Battlefield 6 beta players spent a week roasting the Netflix-style menus, dev says "we're not going to rebuild our menu from scratch" in time for launch, but "we are looking to improve"
Paralives
The Sims 4's colorful competitor Paralives lets you be a passive aggressive king and give backhanded compliments or just straight up diss characters for being bad cooks or because "they have a lower paying job than you"
A poster in Metal Gear Solid Delta
Metal Gear Solid Delta replaces the original game's bikini model posters with new pictures and family photos of the same women 21 years later
Latest in Features
Dogtooth
The new Yorgos Lanthimos movie is getting rave first reactions out of Venice Film Festival, but I think it's worth revisiting his breakout feature Dogtooth before Bugonia hits theaters this fall
D&D Player's Handbook laid out on a wooden surface
Will romantasy be the next great crossover for Dungeons & Dragons? Fourth Wing could be the perfect D&D setting, if you ask me
Jurassic Park: Survival
Jurassic Park: Survival has quietly been 35 years in the making, and it's taking us back to where it all began
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era artwork showing a beautiful fantasy city
Playing Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era has turned me into a Dungeon devotee, and I can't help but feel like I'm already seeing a strategy classic in the making
Out and About screenshot of the player character forager who has purple hair and wears dungarees
Out and About is a very cozy foraging adventure that's taking me back to my fish obsession in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
KPop Demon Hunters still of Rumi and the blue demon tiger
I can't wait for a KPop Demon Hunters sequel, but I'm still not convinced Netflix is actually going to learn anything from the original's success
  1. Rei Shimobe points aggressively in Shuten Order
    1
    Shuten Order review: "The Danganronpa creator's new multi-genre mystery feels like a forgotten DS cult classic I would have been obsessed with"
  2. 2
    The Rogue Prince of Persia review: "I roguelike but don't roguelove this freerunner – there's just not enough to stand out"
  3. 3
    Shinobi: Art of Vengeance review: "So close to being to a pitch-perfect revival of a classic series, but just can't quite line up the killing blow"
  4. 4
    Fate of the Fellowship is the most anticipated board game of the year, and it's a thing of absolute genius
  5. 5
    This is the perfect cozy board game for Fall with its compelling mix of Redwall and city-building
  1. Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic in The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    1
    The Fantastic Four: First Steps review: "An occasionally thrilling heroic adventure that sits safely within a B-tier MCU range"
  2. 2
    Superman review: "A triumphant reinvention and a promising start for the DCU"
  3. 3
    Jurassic World Rebirth Review: "An unscary sequel that needed a little more time in amber"
  4. 4
    M3GAN 2.0 review: "A bold sequel with a slightly underwhelming conclusion"
  5. 5
    28 Years Later Review: "Enough terror, splatter and suspense to satisfy”
  1. John Cena as Peacemaker holds a gun to the head of a different John Cena as Peacemaker in Peacemaker season 2.
    1
    Peacemaker season 2 review: "Darker and sadder than the first year, but there's still a lot of fun to be had with the 11th Street Kids."
  2. 2
    Wednesday season 2 part 1 review: "Complex and exciting but weighed down by too many subplots"
  3. 3
    Alien: Earth review: "Arguably the franchise's strongest outing since James Cameron's Aliens"
  4. 4
    King of the Hill season 14 review: "Hank Hill himself has evolved into a much more open and accepting person"
  5. 5
    Eyes of Wakanda review: "A creative premise shortchanged by the runtime and Marvel bloat"

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...