Gyakuten Kenji 2: Horace Knightley, stabbed in the throat. Isaac Dover, bludgeoned to death with a rock-salt ornament, then hidden inside an ice sculpture for over 10 years. Jill Crane, beaten to death with an auction gavel, then stabbed in the chest with a candlestick. Jack Cameron, hit in the back of the head with a brick. Di-Jun Huang's double, crushed to death under a hot air balloon's basket (the autopsy report for this one was so brutal everyone was convinced he must have been stepped on by a Kaiju-esque monster). And then there's Sirhan Dogen, whose main weapons happen to be his dog and woodcarving chisels... yeah, this game has a lot of brutal deaths.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies: Metis Cykes very narrowly avoided getting posthumously dismembered, by her own daughter, Jack Shipley was initially thought to have been killed by an orca, but actually fell head-first into a drained pool.
The Great Ace Attorney: John Watson was poisoned with curare, a paralytic that couldn't be detected through scientific means in Meiji-Era Japan. He suffocated to death in a restaurant full of people, unable to let out even the tiniest scream of pain, all while his hand was stuck resting on a plate hot enough to burn the logo on the plate into his flesh. One character rightly describes it as being a living hell.
In Corpse Party, any death in Heavenly Host Elementary is going be gruesome, undignified, unsettling, and sometimes heartbreaking. Among the countless people who died there, some of the those who got it the worst include:
Poor Mayu Suzumoto ends up being levitated by three malevolent ghost children, who then launch her into a wall at supersonic speed, leaving nothing more than a stain on the wall and a pile of meat and organs.
Kensuke Kurosaki survives being stabbed and kicked into a hole downstairs, his "best friend" Yuuya Kizami finishes him off. We don't actually see him do it, but we see the results. It's not quite as bad as Mayu's, as we can still tell it's him, but it's still rather messy.
Nana Ogasawara gets her legs chopped off, and then dragged to a dissection room. She is strapped to a table, where her tongue is ripped out. Even then, it would be a bit before she succumbed to shock and blood loss.
Miyu Shinohara first gets one of her Achilles tendons severed, then is sodomized by a tentacle monster before being subsequently beheaded.
A lot of the Wrong Ends, while nowhere near as gruesome, still count (eaten alive, suffocated, forced to cut out your tongue, buried alive, cut in half, lungs pierced by broken ribs, eyes torn out, drowned, torn to bits by a pool drain, stabbed with scissors, mauled, etc). As does Seiko's death (hanged to death in a bathroom stall by her (Darkening-possessed, but she doesn’t know that) best friend). And then there's what happened to the aforementioned ghost children, whose deaths (long before the events of the game) easily qualify as horrific; all of their tongues are cut out, one of them (boy named Ryou), gets stabbed in the abdomen multiple times, the second (girl named Tokiko) gets the top half of her head cut off and the third kid (girl named Yuki, who you have the perspective of when you witness all this) gets stabbed in the eye.
In the first game, soccer player Mitsuhiro is chained to a giant flaming soccer ball and burned to death as he's kicked around by giant Monokumas, runner Ayame is sliced to pieces and then ground up by a buzzsaw machine, priest Kinji is nailed to a cross and then launched into space before crashing back down and being crushed with a tombstone, and clown Satsuki is shoved in a barrel and stabbed with multiple daggers.
In the second, boxer Hajime is trapped in a boxing machine and has his face beaten to a bloody pulp before being shredded and turned into a doll, actress Emma is launched into a facility reminiscent of The Cabin in the Woods and is torn apart by a swarm of monsters, twin musicians Kanade and Hibiki are given a joint execution that involves Hibiki being decapitated and Kanade being slowly hanged to death (after Hibiki smashes her face in with a microphone), and journalist Nikei has one of his hands blown off by a malfunctioning gun and then falls to his death in a vain attempt to escape. Many murders also qualify; Setsuka is stabbed to death and her body is sliced into pieces and put on display, while Shinji has his throat slit twice before he sets himself on fire to prevent anyone from becoming the Blackened.
Dayshift at Freddy's includes death by springlocks, usually Played for Laughs with loud screaming in the background. The springlocks activate any time you come into contact with liquid, move too hard inside the suit, or piss someone off to the point they activate it themselves, resulting in rusty metal spikes piercing through your lungs as blood sprays on the screen. Then, just to add insult to injury, your boss tells you that dying is against the rules and you're fired.
Doki Doki Literature Club!'s first act ends with the player character finding Sayori after she has died from self-inflicted hanging caused by Monika's Mind Rape and Gaslighting. What qualifies for this trope are the details: if you look closely at the CG, Sayori has blood on her hands. Monika later brings up in the third act that Sayori didn't jump high enough to snap her neck, and instead slowly asphyxiated. The blood was from her attempts to tear herself free, whether out of having second thoughts or survival instinct kicking in.
ClockUp's Euphoria is about a Deadly Game. Therefore, gruesome deaths are in high supply:
The Special Bad Ending has Kanae be dissected. Alive. Even when you take into account her true personality, it's hard not to feel sorry for her when she's crying throughout. And considering what happens to everyone else, the sweet release of death may indeed be more comforting...
Rika's bad end has her being crushed to death in a glass box.
As punishment for refusing to participate in the Key Game, Class Representative Andou Miyako gets strapped to an electric chair and brutally shocked to death. And her death is unavoidable.
In The Fruit of Grisaia, during Amane's flashback, we see the results of a bunch of middle school girls trying to survive a bus crash. It doesn't go well: One girl dies wallowing in her own filth because she was too embarrassed to say anything and couldn't get out because her legs were broken. One girl's lacerated stomach became infected and began leaking pus and other various fluids. The flashback cuts out when the narrator ran from the group, but we get the second half of the story in The Eden of Grisaia with deaths every bit as gruesome, including two stabbing-based deaths and one girl's broken nose beginning to leak not just blood but intercranial fluid. However, these deaths all still contained more dignity than those in the first flashback, perhaps because the girls had largely given up their hopes of escaping alive.
Hatoful Boyfriend has some pretty impressive bad endings, and some equally nasty offscreen fates for the other characters. Anghel and Yuuya presumably get experimented on and dissected by Dr. Shuu unless you go on their routes and rescue them. On the "Bad Boys Love" route, the heroine's death by suffocation is revisited in a flashback, as is Nageki's suicide by setting himself on fire.
Two endings in Kokoro No Doki Doki Senpai have Player either spontaneously combust and burn to death or get stoned to death by an angry mob.
In Muv-Luv Alternative, there's the infamous CHOMP scene where Marimo has her head bitten in half by a Soldier-class BETA. It's notable for being extremely disturbing to the player. That's not all for that particular death — Takeru proceeds to run away to the world of "Extra", where Marimo is still alive... until she's promptly killed by having her head shoved into a meat grinder.
Pick a dead end in any NasuverseVisual Novel. Almost any dead end will do. Some of them are so implausibly over-the-top that they cross the line into Narm territory... And it only gets better when the Tiger Dojo or Teach Me, Ciel-sensei segments come next.
Melted to death, despite already being fatally wounded by swords spontaneously stabbing out of your own body... due to falling from a third-floor window.
Murder/suicide by best friend.
In Sable's Grimoire: Man and Elf, Sable can cast a mind destruction spell on the Big Bad. This destroys her brain from the inside out, making her thrash and spasm so violently that she breaks her bones and ruptures her internal organs.
In Spirit Hunter: NG, if a chapter's spirit is destroyed instead of pacified, then its grudge will remain and kill the protagonist's companions in a multitude of grisly ways. In contrast to Spirit Hunter: Death Mark, where said deaths were offscreen, this time there are CGs showing exactly how gruesome their deaths are:
Seiji is the only companion who only has one possible death. He's possessed by Kubitarou, lured to her haunting spot, and decapitated there, after which she sticks a sapling through his head and leaves it for Akira to find.
Kaoru can be killed by the Urashima Woman, who attacks her while she's having a shower and leaves her bloody body there for Akira to find, turtles spewing out of her mouth. Otherwise, she can also be decapitated by Kubitarou, her head remaining alive just long enough to have a brief conversation with Akira over the phone.
Ban is killed by the Screaming Author when it wraps its razor wire around his body and yanks him into the attic. He's strangled, impaled, his neck is broken, and his arm is severed before he finally gives out. Otherwise, he can be literally split down the middle by the Killer Peach.
Rosé's death by the Screaming Author is even more horrible; the spirit believes her to be a bird, since she used her voice to mimic a bird cry earlier, so it grabs her with wire and forcefully yanks her body until it's distorted at all joints, resembling a morbid crane. In particular, her neck is extended in a hideously inhuman way. Her death by Killer Peach is comparatively 'nicer', but it still has her naked and gored through the stomach with a katana.
Four words: Happy Halloween for Maria. If you for some reason want a more detailed explanation: The first twilight of the second arc resulted in six people (Maria's uncles and aunts: Krauss, Natsuhi, Eva, Hideyoshi, Kyrie and Rudolf) locked in the chapel, arranged around a table elaborately spread with a Halloween feast. Their stomachs were ripped open and stuffed full of delicious candy, and the aforementioned note to the resident Creepy Child was scrawled on the door in blood. It was so gory the Japanese TV networks had to censor it.
The very premise is that Beatrice plans to keep killing the same people over and over in new and interesting ways until she can make Battler surrender, but in the third round the new Beatrice gets impatient and starts reviving people as soon as she's killed them just so she can find another few dozen ways to do it again.
The time when another witch, Eva-Beatrice, decided to join the "let's kill people gruesomely over and over" game. Her victims? Maria and her mother Rosa, who get to fly (and then fall to their deaths), drown in jelly, and get crushed by a giant cake. It was in such bad taste that even Beatrice was all "What the...?". The Visual Novel had a few more deaths: being turned into a butterfly and eaten by a spider, falling into a pot of boiling chocolate, and getting baked inside an oven.
Inspired by the abovementioned Danganronpa, Your Turn to Die's executions can get pretty grisly, from being impaled by giant IVs that drain all of your blood to having vines painfully erupt out of your body. No wonder one participant slated to die opts to slice their own wrists instead.
The deaths in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors can get exceedingly gruesome, but the worst is what happens to the Ninth Man. The nine main characters have been forced to swallow an explosive that has already passed into their intestines, and the Ninth Man is used by the game to demonstrate that this is no idle threat. The bomb goes off in his gut while he is crying and screaming about his impending death, and the game goes into a disturbing amount of detail as to just what his shattered and twisted remains look like.
Virtue's Last Reward also has its share of nasty deaths, but the worst may be what happens to Dio in one route. He is locked in a medical pod as a way of holding him on suspicion of murder. The characters later return to find that his oxygen supply was cut off, and he suffocated within the pod, clutching his throat in his final moments. He likely also saw his murderer as it happened, unable to do anything about it. Couldn't have happened to a less nasty guy.
