Bloodier And Gorier / Video Games

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• This is actually something of a reversal for Asura's Wrath. Initial trailers had Asura kill his enemies with much bloodier and gorier deaths, as opposed to how they disappear into light in the final game. It was likely changed to avoid connotations of being a God of War ripoff, and most of the footage was when Keiji Inafune was the game's Executive Producer, who wanted to westernize Japanese games to be able to compete with western developers.
• The Battletoads Arcade Game is much bloodier than the console games that came before it, enough to justify the game listing each player's "Korpse Kount" and the "Greatest Gravefillers." It's still a game about anthropomorphic toads who can transform their body parts into various weapons, so it's very hard to take seriously.
• While Bendy and the Ink Machine was already full of Body Horror, Bendy and the Dark Revival ramps it up to 11, including more explicit blood, a terrifying redesign for The Ink Demon where he is covered in blood, and Audrey transforming from an artificial human to an inky humanoid monster with Tears of Blood.
• FromSoftware's Souls-like RPG games:
  • Bloodborne is this compared to Dark Souls. Not only you can spill blood everywhere, the blood itself is an important thematic and plot device.
  • Dark Souls III retains the the massive blood splatter from Bloodborne, likely due to being based on the same engine.
• Zig-zagged in the Borderlands series. Borderlands 2 tends to feature more blood spilled in combat to showcase its PhysX fluids physics system, but the mutilations from combat tend to be less gory than in Borderlands. A good example is death by shock damage: while in 1 the target's head bursts apart piece by piece while twitching erratically, in 2 they simply vaporize in a shower of blue sparks.
• The Brutal Doom mod includes all kinds of gameplay tweaks, such as slightly beefing up enemy AI and giving them new tricks, replacing the dinky pistol with a far more useful assault rifle, and introducing reloads and other things to make the gunplay slightly more realistic and give it more oomph. What everyone remembers, though, is the ability to practically paint the walls, floor and ceiling in blood and gore, blow zombies' limbs off and have them crawl on the floor in agony, and perform ultraviolent, messy fatalities.
• Call of Duty: World At War took this to the extreme. High powered weapons and explosives could rip apart enemies, tearing off limbs and exposing internal organs. The ending consists of Sgt. Reznov hacking away at a German soldier on the top of the Reichstag before impaling him and kicking him off the building.
  • Modern Warfare and its sequels do this, compared to the previous games in the Call of Duty series. It also ups the rating from Teen to Mature, and justifiably so.
• Capcom's Captain Commando, while a decidedly goofier game than Final Fight, saw heroes and most non-female mooks getting disintegrated with acid and cut in half across their waists.
  • Cadillacs and Dinosaurs took this one step further by having enemy grunts blown to smithereens when they're done in by explosives.
  • Probably the company's most gruesome example is Warriors of Fate (also known as Tenchi wo Kurau 2). With exception to the female soldiers, Mooks frequently get sliced in half, but the bosses can also be decapitated and have their chests sliced apart, exposing their ribs, vital organs, and general musculature. One character can even vaporize the bosses' torsos with his bare hands!
• Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Castlevania: Bloodlines, made for the Turbografx 16 and Sega Genesis respectively, feature more blood and violence than the Castlevania games on Nintendo consoles were allowed to.
• Inverted in the Command & Conquer Tiberium series. In the original Command and Conquer, infantry died bloodily, screaming loudly. In Tiberium Wars, however, these deaths have been replaced by Bloodless Carnage. Paradoxally, the series itself has been getting Darker and Edgier.
• The early Contra games are bloodless due to hardware limitation and monsters are only scary to the minor extents. Since Contra III: The Alien Wars, the games are more intense, more exploding, and bloodier, with some of the alien boss designs being downright hideous. In the PlayStation 2 games Contra: Shattered Soldier and Neo Contra, the player is basically forced into a marathon against Eldritch Abominations and Womb Levels with blood and aliens' substances spraying everywhere.
  • In Neo Contra, if you get a high-enough rank after Stage 5, you will get a cutscene where Mystery G gets killed by Master Contra when saving Bill and Jaguar from getting paralyzed, with G dying under blood pool. Get a perfect hit ratio while playing as Jaguar throughout all 7 stages without dying brings you to a Golden Ending where Jaguar relentlessly slicing the mooks followed by gore and explosions in the first half.
• Darkest Dungeon had a lot of Body Horror, but it was mildly tame in the blood and gore department outside of corpses left behind by enemies. The DLC, the Crimson Court, has vampires as a primary theme. Not only does the Body Horror go up, but the newer enemies have blood dripping from their mouths, infected party members require blood to stay alive, the new class is covered in the stuff, and even your torch is dripping in red when accessing the new area.
• While not as extreme as RE2 Remake and RE7 below, Devil May Cry 5 is easily the most violent Devil May Cry to date. While previous games has a fair share of scenes of explicit violence and gore, it is stepped up to frightening levels in 5 thanks to RE Engine. The demon invasion in the Red Grave City attacks the civilians and soldiers in bloody and violent fashion with the former getting impaled by giant roots, there are blood geysers in front of the Big Bad's throne within the demonic tree and there is a glimpse of Nero getting his Devil Bringer arm amputated by an unknown assailant, complete with High-Pressure Blood to top it off.
• .flow compared to Yume Nikki. Yume Nikki simply has a recurring bloodstain. .flow has blood and/or rust show up pretty everywhere.
• Dragon Age: Origins is pretty bloody and gory for an RPG. Melee combat with enemies that aren't bloodless always results in blood sprayed over the combatants. The finishers take the take though: death by being beaten with a shield, stabbing and decapitation, being impaled on a greatsword, etc. One of the special traits of the unique greatsword Ageless even increases the chances of a bloody kill. There is also a spell that turns a corpse into a bomb of blood and gore and another spell that freezes enemies in place while the blood erupts from their bodies.
  • And Dragon Age II is much bloodier and gorier, with body parts constantly flying around.
    • It even parodies its own bloodier-and-gorier tendencies in Varric's prologue, in which every monster ends up in Ludicrous Gibs.
  • Subverted with Dragon Age: Inquisition, which while still a bloody game, relies considerably less on the blood motif, compared to previous games.
• Duke Nukem:
  • Easy to mod into Duke Nukem 3D through editing GAME.CON in a text editor. Just don't go too overboard or killing an enemy with the rocket launcher can crash the game.
  • Compare Duke Nukem 3D to its predecessors. Yes, like Forever, the title was a pun. This is actually the sequel to a pair of action platformers that bear little-to-no resemblance at all to Duke Nukem 3D.
• Earth Defense Force 5:
  • The game ups the gore compared to its previous titles. While there are still sprays of blood from living alien enemies there are now rather simple blood splat marks when you kill enemies. In addition injured enemies now have a location based damage texture that reflect the severity of damage done to the enemy.
  • Enemies now die in a spray of gibs and chunks especially when killed with powerful or explosive weapons.
  • Giant humanoid enemies can have individual limbs blown off forcing them to crawl around or try and fight you missing an arm.
• Far Cry Primal is by far the bloodiest Far Cry game released yet. There are tons of horrifically mangled human and animal corpses scattered throughout Oros, and even though you can't use guns anymore, you're basically engaging in tribal warfare, where Bludgeoned to Death, Impaled with Extreme Prejudice and Kill It with Fire are standard responses to enemy intrusions. That said, Primal is also Lighter and Softer than any of the other Far Cry games, with an Earn Your Happy Ending.
• Final Fantasy Type-0 is significantly more violent than any other title in the series, true to the game's War Is Hell mentality.
• F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is noticeably gorier than the first game.
• The First Funky Fighter is a bloodier and gorier take on Whack-A-Mole. You even get to rip sharks in half with your bare hands.
• Five Nights at Freddy's initially had Bloodless Carnage — the gruesomeness of being stuffed into an animatronic suit was largely implied, with the Game Over screen merely having the eyes hang out. The third game, however, features Springtrap, who has the Purple Man's crushed and mangled corpse inside his suit, with organs, veins and a mummified skull visible at various points. And you see how he got into Springtrap at the end of Night 5; even with the Atari-esque graphics, it's far from a pretty sight.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 4, while far less gorier than the third game, isn't any less than the first two games either, as it replaces the standard game over static with blood.
• Gears of War: Aside from the already gruesome chance to kill someone using an assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet attached, the sequels exaggerate the Ludicrous Gibs factor with a flamethrower, mortar, hand-carried minigun, grenades also acting as proximity mines and multiple types of executions than the standard curbstomping someone's head to the pavement in the original.
• God of War does this to many Greek myths, but by default. The myths were pretty violent to begin with, but you got to see it in the game. Plus those weren't really considered that violent in those days mainly due to Values Dissonance.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto V. Given the graphic improvement of the game, the scenes of violence are much more detailed, as well as how characters are often stained with blood and wounds after gunfight (while still acting fit). Not only that, the game also gave us a torture mission, where you are the torturer.
  • Zig-zagged in the previous games:
    • Grand Theft Auto III allows you to blow any human character into Ludicrous Gibs.
    • In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the overall violence level is reduced, only letting you decapitate human characters, yet using the chainsaw will cause blood to splatter on the screen, and there is a (non-interactive) cutscene featuring a person violently blown up by an explosive he made himself.
    • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is on a similar level to Vice City, but blood doesn't stick to the screen anymore while using the chainsaw, and there are a couple of scripted instances of violence, one featuring a motorcycle cop being reduced to Ludicrous Gibs after being unwittingly hit by the propellers of a helicopter, another allowing the player to shred anyone caught in a combine harvester's blades.
• Hitman was concieved as a dark series, but due to technical limitations, the classics are tame compared to the next-gen games.
  • About the goriest scene in Hitman: Codename 47 was an operating theater with a bloody cadaver left lying in the open. (The hospital is a front.) Hitman: Contracts consists of a drug-induced flashback to said hospital, which is rife with human experimentation, and a murder victim wrapped in plastic and hanging from the ceiling in a meat packing plant.
  • Hitman: Blood Money had a wider variety of weapons, so there was nothing stopping you from taking a swing at someone's head with a hammer, causing it to become lodged in their skull, or pinning them to the wall with a nailgun. This was also the first game to introduce the "accident" system, which allows you to immolate people by rigging grills or pyrotechnics to explode.
  • Hitman: Absolution is possibly the most violent of them all: in addition to grislier "accidents" like electrocuting a stream of urine coming out of the victim (ouch), you could lunge at someone from behind with a katana and impale them through the mouth. This was also the first Hitman to feature long cutscenes with mo-capped actors, and it reveled in the violence. Hitman is made out to be the vigilante here, so his enemies need to be even more cutthroat than he is. One of the mini-bosses, Wade, executes a nun as a hazing ritual. A team of cleaners known as "the Saints" fire an RPG at a roadside hotel Hitman is staying in, killing all of the guests. One tongue-in-cheek "mission" involves a defenseless gangster who can be killed by Hitman in any number of ways, including simply driving away and leaving him to die of thirst or heatstroke.
  • Hitman (2016) is more the same, with the addition of ambushing people in the bathroom and dunking them in the toilet, causing them to drown in their own filth. As always, though, there is no benefit to using guns or blades, besides the cheap thrill; you are rewarded for keeping it quiet and leaving no trace.
• Impossible though it may sound, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is even more violent than its already ultraviolent predecessor, albeit in a subtle but still VERY noticeable manner. You may notice that the deaths are more graphic and detailed this time around (you'll see guts spilling out from enemies a lot more often and in larger amounts, for one thing) once you examine them, the executions are much more sadistic and disturbing, and the amount of bloodshed is higher.
• The House of the Dead: OVERKILL, ironically, was actually toned down to realistic levels compared to the first three games and Zombie Revenge (and those typing games). You could blast chunks off of bodies or blow holes clean through torsos in earlier games; in Overkill, all you can do is explode heads, sever arms or legs, or get a semi-gib in which the head and all limbs are removed — and that requires either the Slow Motion powerup or a hit to the head with a powerful gun (like max-damage automatic shotgun). However, there is the slaughterhouse level in the PlayStation 3 remake, in which most of the zombies are nothing but muscle and organs (undoubtedly one of the most disgusting sights ever seen in a video game).
  • The House of The Dead series in general inverts this starting from House of the Dead 4, where it simply has the zombies burst into flames or dissolve into pixie dust.
• I Wanna Be the Guy looks like a close pastiche of early console games, except with the player character exploding in showers of gore whenever hit.
• Karous is this to Radirgy as the opening cinematic features blood splats and elements killed when infected by the parasites within the D.F.S. field bleed when they are destroyed.
• Layton Brothers: Mystery Room is a Spin-Off of the family-friendly Professor Layton series. Unlike those games, it features some rather gruesome crime scenes. The fourth case is probably the standout example, with the victim having an axe lodged into his forehead, resulting in loads and loads of blood splattered all over the room.
• While blood, gore and organs are nothing uncommon of the classic splatter and zombie genres, Left 4 Dead 2 takes it to the extreme when compared to its predecessor. Shoot someone in the head and watch it crumble?: Lame. Shoot an infected down low and watch its intestines unravel and trail along the ground behind him as he continues to tear after you?: Awesome. It was so awesome, that it was banned in Australia.
• The Legend of Zelda inverts this trope. The games got significantly LESS bloody after the N64 title, especially Ocarina of Time, which featured a torture device with a pool of blood underneath it, Ganon vomiting blood, blood splatter effects when enemies are hit, and a bloodstained Dead Hand.

M-Z

• Madou Monogatari compared to its spinoff Puyo Puyo. Quite possibly the most jarring example of this trope ever. Compared to the lighthearted and cutesy Puyo Puyo games, the cartoon violence of which is extremely tame on the rare occasions it's even present, the PC-98 versions of Madou Monogatari 1-2-3 occasionally feature bloody◊ decapitations◊.
• Mass Effect 2 is notably bloodier and gorier (most noticeable when you zoom in with a sniper rifle) than its predecessor, and also far more justifiably M-rated compared to the barely M-rated first game. Mass Effect 3 takes it a little further, including headshots blowing enemy heads apart and explosions reducing victims to gibs.
• Max Payne 3 is definitely gorier than its predecessors, especially the bullet exit wound animations.
• MechWarrior Living Legends seriously ratcheted up the blood 'n guts in a series that is traditionally bloodless either due to technical limitations or from a lack of infantry. In Living Legends, players in Powered Armor will be reduced to Ludicrous Gibs when overkilled by high-powered Humongous Mecha weaponry and their visor heads up display will be sprayed with suit sealant and blood when damaged. Sniping the Cockpit of a battlemech will result in a satisfying spray of blood. Subsequent titles return to bloodless carnage.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is this to the rest of the Metal Gear series. Not only is it a full-on Action Game, but you can now "Cut at Will". It shows extremely well in the trailer, with Raiden slicing soldiers into a billion little bloody pieces.
  • Metal Gear Solid V has bigger and more noticeable blood sprays, as part of the Darker and Edgier feeling of the games, with cutscenes that show off the Fox Engine's detailed gore during certain scenes.
  • While Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is pretty violent, the novelisation goes for full Nausea Fuel with how it depicts Snake's journey through the microwave corridor. In game, the corridor destroys his suit which explodes in a gory-ish way; in the book, the same injuries happen to his flesh.
• Mortal Kombat, AKA that video game series which featured characters pulling spines out of other characters during the Clinton administration. Apparently, your average MK character had about 3-5 ribcages (ludicrous ribs!) and 12 femurs.
  • Mortal Kombat 9 and X. The Fatalities are really trying to push the envelope now. (No one had their eyeballs forcibly shocked out of their heads in 9, gory as it was.)
  • MK11 introduces something called "GoreTech" to make it even more visceral than X. Baraka's fatality consists of ripping his opponent's face off and the flesh he removes is still writhing and twitching even after being separated from the opponent's head. However, characters don't show damage to the degree they did in 9. Jim Sterling has talked about it and the effect that it had on team members, who became traumatized due to management forcing them to look at pictures of beheadings and industrial accidents for reference. At least one dev on MK11 has been diagnosed with PTSD. The MK games really have gotten increasingly gruesome over time.
• Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4's Mob Battle of Obito vs Mist Ninjas. Unlike any previous Mob Battles, any killed enemies don't just lie on the ground and vanish into smoke after a few seconds, they become blood, blood that remains on the floor of their death site for likely the whole battle. And your screen can get the occasional splashes of blood as Obito tears apart each enemy in his rampage. Even if it's censored blood, this is well for one of the darkest moments of Naruto.
• Compared to Namco × Capcom, Project × Zone is a lot messier in terms of showing blood. Hell, even Jedah's Limit Break practically splats the unlucky character to a wall all bloodied up.
• Perfect Dark in comparison to GoldenEye (1997). There were blood animations in the latter, but not the detailed spatter effects seen in the former. Also, they remain even after the enemies' bodies have faded.
• Persona 5: Compared to previous Persona games, which had largely Bloodless Carnage. The protagonist is beaten by police at the beginning of the story to the point he's covered in bruises, various characters bleed black blood from their eyes and mouth after being targeted by The Conspiracy, characters bloodily rip masks of their face when first awakening to their Persona, you sneak attack enemies by ripping the masks they use for faces off, the game's main Color Motif is vivid blood red, and during the game's first bad ending, Joker can be seen headshot by Akechi and his blood splatters over the floor. In Royal, the death of Kasumi Yoshizawa also displays her carnage lying on a road, covered in blood while a grief struck Sumire and some shocked passerby watch after she was hit by traffic.
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within added in lots of blood that wasn't present in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, despite your enemies being made of sand, and therefore not actually having any blood.
• In Quest for Glory III, many death animations show the hero melting, (if poisoned,) impaled by a spear, or turning into a food product such as a hamburger or (in a famous Easter egg) a pizza. (When eaten. And no, it is not as disturbing as you think.) While it is not overly bloody, it is certainly more so than the first two games. This is surprisingly Inverted in the fourth and darkest game, in which some deaths just show (vegetarian!) food products if the hero is eaten, and most deaths just show the hero falling. Only a few examples avert this.
• Resident Evil
  • The Resident Evil 2 (Remake) is a lot gorier than the original 1998 game. Zombies are particularly nasty as your shots blow chunks out of them, and they are much more resilient than before; you can have a zombie still lurching towards you with his face and half of his skull missing from a shotgun blast. Leon and Claire also show visible wounds when they get bitten and scratched, with persistent scars after healing.
  • Resident Evil 7 upped the gore compared to previous titles, due to the Art Evolution into photorealistic graphics, and a greater focus on the horror aspect, compared to the action-horror of the last three titles, which were a case of Actionized Sequel.
  • Before these, Resident Evil: Revelations 2 upped the gore and blood considerably, especially in comparison to the first Revelations title. Enemy designs leaned deeper into the Body Horror realm and death scenes became far more gruesome. Justified, since the game focuses on fear and an experiment that drives unwilling participants into horrific mutation through torture and all manners of terror.
• This is what the higher violence control settings in Rise of the Triad do compared to the lower ones. Also, compared to Wolfenstein 3-D, upon which its engine is based, the game is definitely this with the gore on the default setting (which also happens to be the maximum).
• Serious Sam HD has significantly more blood than the original games it is an Updated Re-release of, plus Ludicrous Gibs. The HD remake's goriness is amplified even further as enemies explode into easily discernable body parts, which contrasts with the large, sponge-shaped chunks seen in the original games.
• Sleeping Dogs (2012) is extremely violent compared to either the previous True Crime games and Grand Theft Auto, featuring civilians killed in cutscenes during gunfights, violent deaths at weddings and funerals (and it's not played comically at all unlike GTA) and the infamous scene when Jackie is disemboweled right before Wei is tortured.
• Sniper Elite V2 and Sniper Elite III are both bloodier and gorier than the game before it. One of the game's big party tricks is an Arrow Cam system that tracks a killshot through the air and brings up an x-ray view of the unfortunate victim, allowing you to watch the bullet pass through his body with realistic effect. The third game features the most advanced version, with muscle and circulatory layers and dynamic bone destruction: a shot to the leg will show the bullet smashing through his femur bone; a shot to the heart will show the bullet tumbling through the chest cavity, breaking ribs and shredding the organ; a shot to the head will show the bullet perforating through the skull, demolishing the facial bones and/or possibly splattering the eyeball; and a shot to the testicles... well, you can probably guess.
• The original Soldier of Fortune had a rather cartoonish gore system, with limbs flying off from shotgun blasts at implausible range, heads blown clean off by the game's Hand Cannon, people inflating and exploding from the microwave gun, bodies reduced to bloody kibble by grenade explosions, etc. The second game had more scarily realistic damage modeling (jaws blown off, brains splattered, blood squirting from severed limbs, etc.). Payback returned to Itchy & Scratchy style gore.
• Downplayed in the Game Mod Sonic Erazor, wherein the series' trademark spikes are bloody. This applies to itself as well — earlier versions had a small circle on the tip, while the final versions are much more obvious in their goriness.
• The Splatterhouse series was always rife with blood and Gorn and a copious amount of Body Horror. In fact, it'd be hard to find a single screen without one or all of those things. The remake, however, manages to crank this up in just about every way possible.
• Star Wars: Republic Commando is fairly bloody and gory for a Star Wars game, but managed to stay T-Rated. Granted the bloods in game are either Geonosian, Trandoshan, or droid oil.
• While Tales Series games tend to adhere to Bloodless Carnage, the manga releases of the games often do not. The Tales of Destiny 2 manga noticeably features a lot of blood when the game had none at all.
  • And there's Tales of Berseria who shows a lot of blood, wounds and bloodied gash where people were slashed and impaled and even had a scene early where Velvet kills a Daemon with blood-splattering on her face. However, compared to Final Fantasy Type-0 above (who manage to get a M rating just for blood only compared to the mostly T-rated franchise) the game still has a T rating in spite of all that.
• Thrill Kill was going to be this, as it was based off of Mortal Kombat with the gorn turned up a notch.
• TimeSplitters Future Perfect is a partial subversion of this trope's association with Darker and Edgier. The game had blood and gore for the first time in the series, earning the franchise's first M rating from the ESRB.
• The Blood and Gore DLC packs for both Total War: Shogun 2 and Total War: Rome II definitely live up to the title, turning the Bloodless Carnage of otherwise massive conflicts into utterbloodbaths.
• Turok 2: Seeds of Evil infamously upped the gore after the first game, but Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion toned it down again.
• The original Twisted Metal games were usually reserved to blood puddles and explosions with few exceptions. Black and the 2012 reboot changes this up a bit with a lot more violent scenes in addition to being Darker and Edgier.
• Apart from a few stains of blood here and there, Yomawari: Night Alone didn't have much gore, barring the ending where the main character's eye explodes. In Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, there's a lot more blood and instances of severed body parts. Their respective age ratings reflect this, with Night Alone being T-rated and Midnight Shadows being M-rated.
• The Warriors (the 2005 Rockstar game inspired by the cult 1970s movie) definitely qualifies. While there was some blood in the movie, it was pretty restrained and nowhere near as disgusting as certain portions of the game, particularly a sequence early on where you sneak through the shadows surrounding a gang hideout and attack enemy guards from behind with a knife, slitting their throats clean open so that they die messily. (And you're a good guy!)
• Waxworks (1992), the Spiritual Successor of Elvira, one ups the already gory original by being filled to the brim with infamously disturbing game over screens.
• The original Whack Your... games by Doodie were by no means bloodless, but Box10 arguably amped it up with their own series of games, which are more vicious. Then the WhackIt series came in; the protagonists tend to be outright Sadists and perform Cold-Blooded Torture on more than one occasion.
• Xak III: The Eternal Recurrence compared to the previous games. While it retains much of the humor and lighthearted character interactions, it also has the villains slaughtering soldiers and royalty by the dozens, spraying pixelated blood all over, having a Princess Classic character get decapitated, then later showing soldiers tossing her corpse around like a football.
• X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse is far more violent than most other X-Men games. All the X-Men clones leave behind bloody, ravaged corpses when you kill them, assuming you don't use something like the flamethrower.
• The Ys series mostly depicted Bloodless Carnage up until the sequels started getting developed for Windows computers, after which the games featured the severed limbs and decapitated heads of killed enemies flying across the screen as the floor is painted in their blood. About a decade later Falcom then switched to developing for consoles instead of PC, after which the blood and gore was heavily toned down, not depicting much more than clouds of red mist for blood sprays.

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