Dem Bones / Video Games

Types of skeletons in Video Games.

• Abyss Odyssey: Skeletons and zombies are some of the most numerous manifestations of the Warlock's dreams that are invading reality from the Abyss. The playable Ghost Monk is a manifestation of all the Chilean soldiers that have died in the Abyss, and takes on the form of a jumble of glowing red bones surrounded by shadow and a hooded cloak.
• Ancient Domains of Mystery: The Necromancy skill lets you raise humanoid corpses as skeletons. Only Necromancers will have high enough skill/stats to make the more powerful skeleton kings. Otherwise, skeletons are common mooks.
• The Adventures of Lomax: Haunted ship levels have skeletons as enemies.
• Age of Wonders has these as the bulk troops of the Undead faction, including the subtypes like skeleton archers.
• Ancient Empires: These are a unit type. They wield maces and have the same stats as a normal soldier. They can't be bought like other units: instead, they're raised from a gravestone by a Wizard (Sorceress in the sequel) — gravestones are structures that are left by dead units and are consumed once a skeleton is raised from them. They take extra damage from the attacks of Wisps. Though not particularly powerful, they can be produced in large numbers and are useful for missions where you don't have a castle to buy units from.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures: A rare heroic example: the Guitar Guy is just a skeleton, a nod to his death in the original series.
• Arena.Xlsm, made in Microsoft Excel, has several types of these. For instance, Skeleton Warrior is just a boring level 10-12 melee-only enemy: while it deals doubled melee damage, shooting it before it ever gets there is not too difficult. The Skeleton Archer is far more powerful, with about 345 health and the attack range of 5 squares, only somewhat compensated by its vulnerability to melee attacks. The Skeleton Mages are one of the worst enemies in the game, attacking both in melee and at range, while being invulnerable to all ranged attacks and melee''' attacks.
• Astyanax: Sword-wielding skeletons are all over the place. One even shows up as a mini-boss to end a level.
• Away: Journey to the Unexpected: One of the enemies you face in the game is skeletons dressed up in Labiworks outfits.
• Baldur's Gate had enemy skeletons, but you could also summon your own with the proper spell.
  • Baldur's Gate II, especially in Throne of Bhaal, features several floating skulls, which are infinitely more nasty than their full-bodied counterparts.
  • Even in the original, common skeletons cease to be a serious threat after level 3 or so. But near the end, the game starts throwing the much nastier skeleton warriors at you, and one of the bonus bosses in the expansion is a death knight.
• Banjo-Kazooie: The Limbos will get right back up after a few seconds, and the only way to kill them for good is with Wonderwing. Gruntilda in Banjo-Tooie is one, due to spending two years trapped under a rock after the end of the first game.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum, of all games, features these during bouts with Scarecrow while under the influence of his fear toxin, though they're actually regular Mooks. There's also a Challenge Map named this, featuring exclusively this type of enemy. LEGO Batman does the same thing in the Boss Battle against Scarecrow.
• Battle Brothers has the Ancient Dead, which are the dead legions of the Roman Empire Expy that used to rule most of the known world, before it expanded too far and its nobles discovered the necromantic traditions of the southern cults, and preferred to preserve themselves as vampires in charge of skeleton legions over preserving the empire itself. All of these skeletons might have low actual health, but they also suffer no bleed damage, no bonus damage from head strikes, only 20% ranged damage and 50% piercing damage (since arrows rely on bleeding and organ damage to kill, which is irrelevant to them.) Like with real-life Legions, their weakest variety are lightly armed and armored Ancient Auxiliaries, most fighting is done by the proper legionaries, while Honor Guard are rare, but highly skilled and fully encased in the toughest armor. There are also the Ancient Priests, who can break the Morale of your mercenaries with "Horrify" spell, and cast area-of-effect Miasma.
• Battle for Wesnoth: Two of the major Undead faction unit types are skeletons, one with an axe and the other with a bow. They have very high resists to Pierce, Cold, and Blade damage types, but are very vulnerable to Impact, Fire, and Arcane damage. They can also move through and hide in deep water, and being Undead, are immune to poison and plague attacks. Combat with the Undead typically requires a lopsided unit selection to combat these. They usually serve as basic troops and as bodyguards to Glass Cannon Dark Adepts in multiplayer, and are typically spammed by the AI in campaigns. Also, the high-level Lich unit, one of the levelled-up forms of the aforementioned Dark Adept, is skeletal and loses its old human characteristics in exchange for skeleton characteristics.
• Battle Monsters from Scarab, is a 1995 Japanese Mortal Kombat clone for the Sega Saturn. Among the monsters is the sword-wielding skeleton Fangore. Fangore is visually unusual for a skeleton. Besides having a bright-red mohawk(!) and a skull that's a bit more crocodilian than simian, Fangore is a beefy guy. He's as tall as Deathmask, the resident Frankenstein Monster, and significantly wider. His bones are also very chunky, with his humerus being thicker than the upper arms of most of the other characters.
• The Binding of Isaac:
  • Bonies are skeletons that fire a bone projectile when you get in line with them. Since their projectiles move so fast and you have to get in line with them to attack them, they're pretty bad Demonic Spiders even for this game. They also have a black variant which fires three shots and explodes on death.
  • The final Secret Character in Antibirth+ is The Forgotten, a skeleton that represents Isaac's bones. He is primarily a melee attacker with his own bones but can throw them by charging. He also has the ability to switch to The Soul who can fly but is chained to the Forgotten's body.
  • The Harbinger Death is entirely skeletal in appearance, right down to his horse. Ultra Death takes it a step further by not only using his scythe in proper, but also summoning a wavy Bullet Hell of giant skulls.
• Blasphemous has Melquíades the Exhumed Archbishop, a giant skeleton propped up by equally giant hands from off-screen.
• Bloodborne features Darkbeast Paarl, who is an electric wolf skeleton the size of a bus.
• A Blurred Line: Choosing a career as an Actor in Paradise will result in you facing some Undead enemies in the abandoned theatre near it, which includes a Risen Dead skeleton with a sword and a shield and a Skeletal Warrior with two scimitars. Then, there are the traditional skeletons in the dungeons within Eisen’s simulation.
• Breath of Death VII: The main character is a skeleton named Dem.
• Brigador: Precursor James, the most expensive mercenary, is depicted in his file photo as a skeleton in a military uniform with a death mask. It is unclear if he is using a nonrepresentative photo on purpose, if everyone is too scared of him to try to take his picture, or if he is in fact an actual walking skeleton.
• Carnevil: The Big Bad, Dr. Tökkentäkker, have his Cool Airship manned by a literal skeleton crew, and in the Final Battle they act as the villain's backup.
• Castle in the Darkness: One enemy type you encounter in the game is skeletons throwing bones.
• Castle Of Pixel Skulls: Both the Player Character and all the enemies in the game are living skeletons.
• Castlevania: There are dozens of varieties in each game, including a lot of simple Underground Monkey recolors. The red ones keep getting back up. There are also laser-firing skeletons, the armor-wearing blade Masters, and the amusing skeletons called Yoricks in Aria of Sorrow that kick their skulls at you. There's even a medal-wearing champion runner Skeleton in Circle of the Moon, the Skeleton Bartender who tosses drinks at you in Protrait of Ruin, the Farmer Skeleton, the Waiter Skeleton, the Rider Kicking Skeleton, and the Ape skeleton introduced in Rondo of Blood that throws barrels at you.
  • Castlevania 64 has Biker Skeletons (in 1800). There's also a giant skeleton as a boss.
  • Castlevania: Harmony of Despair: The multiplayer mode has a feature that activates when a player character's HP goes to zero: they turn into a standard bone-flinging skeleton, and they must be given a specific item for them to be able to turn back to normal. A death as a skeleton causes penalties on the level's time limit.
• Cataclysm features skeletons with varying levels of strength as enemies. Cutting weapons do little damage and ranged weapons aren't much better, but blunt weapons are very effective against them.
• Cave Story has hopping sandcroc skulls, sandcroc skulls with feet, sandcroc skulls carried by birds, and full sandcroc skeletons.
• Chantelise: There are sword wielding skeletons that can only be defeated by magical attacks.
• Chasm: Various skeletons are a frequent enemy. There's even a skeleton boss, King Trell, whose lack of lungs doesn't stop him from blowing into a horn to raise skeleton archers out of the ground.
• Chrono Cross: One of the early characters you can meet is the disembodied skull of a clown looking for the rest of his body parts. Naturally, he asks you to help him find them all. He appears to have been getting around until then by hopping with his jaw. Later, you get to meet his family, who has been wondering what happened to him.
• Clash of Clans has a few skeletal troopers.
  • Wall Breakers are bomb-toting skeletons that blow up walls (and themselves) to make an opening for troops. They have low health, so it's best to lay down sturdier troops to cover them.
  • Balloons are bomb-toting skeletons in hot air balloons that drop bombs on defenses. They're slow at attacking, but only anti-air defenses can hit them.
  • Witches can create an army of skeleton warriors to raid forts.
• The Crystal of Kings have a plethora of skeleton-based enemies, from the basic skeletons (which are the weakest, a whole army of them serves the Necromancer Mini-Boss but can be killed easily) to the floating Bone Sentinels and the Elite Mook Red Skeletons which are far stronger and harder to defeat. T He final stage also have Skeletal Gladiators, the Praetorian Guard warriors serving the evil Nightspirit.
• Cryptkiller features skeletons as The Goomba. They show up in absolutely massive droves in every level.
• Cuphead: One of the passengers on the Phantom Express is T-Bone, a giant skeleton with a trucker hat. His design is loosely based on the Gashadokuro from Japanese folklore.
• Eastern Exorcist: Temple of Zen is infested with all sorts of skeleton enemies, ranging from skeleton warriors armed with swords, bows or spears, to skeltal monks who can cast attacking spells and summon ranged projectiles. There's also a skeleton knight boss riding a skeltal horse in the same stage.
• The Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island had the fearsome Murray, the demonic animated skeleton with plans to conquer the world, who would have been significantly more fearsome if he wasn't just a skull and unable to move around by himself. Still, with lines like this, it's no wonder "Murray the Mighty Demonic Skull" is so popular:
  Murray: I'm a powerful demonic force! I'm the harbinger of your doom! And the forces of darkness will applaud me as I stride through the gates of hell carrying your head on a pike!
  Guybrush: Stride?
  Murray: All right then, roll! Roll through the gates of hell. Must you take the fun out of everything?
  • The Curse of Monkey Island also had the skeletal ghostly bride whom you must reunite with her lover (who died after being trapped between a wall and his bed mattress), in order to break her curse and obtain her ring.
  • Monkey Island had more examples in LeChuck's demonic crew. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge notably featured Dem Bones actually singing "Dem Bones".
• Dark Chambers features skeletons as enemies.
• Darkest Dungeon: The Ancestor's early experiments with the forbidden knowledge involved resurrecting some old skeletons in the Manor himself. Soon, however, he invited the best Necromancers in the world to the Manor, learned everything he could from them, and then slit their throats at night, before resurrecting them as conscious and capable slaves to his will, who would raise and re-raise all the other skeletons for him, forming the so-called Bone Army populating the Ruins by the time the game proper begins.
  • Since Ruins is the first area you get access to, members of the Bone Army are typically the least challenging to fight. They are the only faction whose melee damage dealer archetype, Bone Soldier/Veteran/Sergeant, has a weaker version occasionally mixed in, called Bone Rabble/Conscript/Militia. Similarly, both Bone Soldiers and their ranged counterpart Arbalists focus entirely on straight-up damage. While Bone Defenders and Bone Captain can at least stun your party members, the entire faction has no-one able to inflict Damage Over Time status effects. Though, they themselves are immune to bleed, for obvious reasons, but are the most vulnerable to blight, which easily degrades their bones.
  • The Bone Courtier is especially popular with fandom, due to being able to inflict stress damage by throwing old wine on your heroes. It's implied that seeing what was once an incredibly wealthy and prominent man reduced to this mockery of his past revelries confronts the party members with their own mortality, while the Scratch Damage from the attack is due to the wine having long ago devolved into acidic vinegar.
• Dark Souls features several regular human skeletons wielding swords and shields, as well as skeletons that are intertwined with spiked carriage wheels that will run you down at any opportunity. The Tomb of the Giants also features massive quadruped but vaguely humanoid skeletons, and Gravelord Nito is a skeleton made of other skeletons and wielding a sword made from them. There's also the Darkwraiths, whose armor bears a skeletal motif, they also comes with a skull mask, which its item description implies that it's fused with their skins.
  • Dark Souls II sees the return of the sword-and-board and Bonewheel skeletons, as well as a trio of bosses called the Skeleton Lords. True to their title, they sit on thrones made of bones and wield weapons made of them, and upon death they summon a bunch of skeletons of various types. There's also a variety of skeleton that won't die until you kill the necromancer that is reviving them.
  • Dark Souls III brings back the bones one last time and manages to one-up every skeleton in the series to this point by giving us High Lord Wolnir, a skeleton king roughly five stories tall with a skull the size of a modest apartment and the ability to summon smaller skeletons to distract you (although he's just as likely to wipe them out with his massive swings as you are with a sword). The game also introduces the Lightning Bruiser Carthus Swordsman Skeletons who are even more dangerous since their weapons inflict Bleed. Fortunately the skeletons in this game have an Achilles' Heel in the form of strike damage weapons, which break them apart with each blow.
• In the TurboGrafx-16 Shoot 'Em Up Dead Moon, many of the bosses resemble giant skeletal animals, and the Final Boss is the head, torso and Floating Limbs of a giant humanoid skeleton.
• Devil May Cry:
  • In the first game, Sargasso is a lesser demon that resembles a human skull. Its only attack is to try to bite Dante.
  • Devil May Cry 2:
    • Sargasso return from the first game and are still floating demon skulls that either attempt to bite the player character or shoot icicles at them.
    • Bolverk's body is skeletal in appearance.
  • Devil May Cry 5: Hell Cainas and Hell Judeccas are scythe-wielding demons with a skeletal appearance underneath their hoods and/or robes.
• Diablo II, of course, with both enemy and summonable skeletons.
  • The original and sequel both have skellies as foes, but you couldn't summon any in the original. The original also have a unique enemy called Leoric the Skeleton King, basically a skeleton with a hugeass sword and a crown in his head, which can be encountered in the game or skipped out depending on how the game started. He proves popular enough that Blizzard expanded and fleshed out his backstory from merely 'king fallen into madness' into some sort of tragic figure (while still a mad king) linked with one of the original heroes. He also becomes the model of a hero in Defense of the Ancients until he changed into Wraith King (see below for more), and he also returns for a first stage mandatory boss fight for the third game, switching his huge sword to a huge mace, and then he carried his last appearance in Heroes of the Storm.
    • The summonables are quite strange, in that you can assemble a (human) Skeleton from the corpse of any monster, up to and including giant spiders, pygmies, ghosts, small rat-like creatures, swarms of locusts and other skeletons. The latter wouldn't be so bad if the process did not involve Ludicrous Gibs.
  • The Diablo III information states that the undead are not from a single corpse. Instead, they essentially turn a corpse into bone powder and reconfigure it into a skeleton. When you raise any skeleton, it's really like you're raising a thousand tenths of a percent of a thousand different skeletons and sticking them together.
• Digital Devil Saga: During the Coordinate 136 dungeon, there's a floor with numerous pitfallss that throw you in the actual dungeons (as in, the cells) below. There you'll find a series of skeletons tied to the wall who will assault you with skeleton puns each and every time you talk to them.
  Skeleton: I'm sure you figured out that you're boned...
  Skeleton: C'mon, what's your nerve? ...Not that I have any.
• Distorted Travesty 3 offers these in their RPG segment.
• Divine Divinity: while there are several kinds of skeletons around, the trope is lampshaded early in the game: two philosophic skeletons are having a debate about their existence. They notice that they think without a brain, move without muscles... and that they don't have any joints to keep them together. Then they fall apart.
• Doom:
  • Doom has the Lost Souls, which are floating flaming skulls.
  • Doom II adds the Revenants, which are giant skeletons wearing metal chest armor and shoulder-mounted missile launchers.
  • Doom³:
    • In this game it's shown that Revenants are actually demons with transparent flesh which makes their skeleton visible; and there are also the Arch-Viles, which clearly have a layer of skin but are otherwise very reminiscent of a walking skeleton.
    • The Expansion Pack Resurrection of Evil has the Forgotten Ones, which are floating flaming skulls similar to the aforementioned Lost Souls.
  • Doom (2016) again features Lost Souls, as well as the new Revenants, which now still have attached some bits and pieces of flesh and muscle. The codex explains that they used to be humans and they were transformed by both cybernetic implants and exposure to demonic energies, and as a result their skeleton went through an accelerated growth and literally tore their flesh from their bodies; they also now possess jet packs in addition to their shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.
• In Dota 2, before reviving as the Wraith King due to pressing ceremonial reasons, Ostarion (previously Leoric) was once the Skeleton King, the manliest hero in the game who does not have testicles, and a hard-to kill hero with a penchant for dreadful puns. There's also Clinkz the Bone Fletcher, a master archer who was accidentally cursed to become a perpetually burning (and thus perpetually in pain) skeleton, and Pugna, a psychopathic skeletal mage who preys on other mages.
• In Dragon Age: Origins:
  • They are an enemy type encountered in places where the Veil is thin, be it the ancient elven burial grounds, or the revisited Ostagar battlefield in the DLC. Like the other undead in the game, they are corpses possessed by minor demons who have mistaken them for a living human. This is a terrible mistake, because dead bodies lack any living energy to sustain them, and demons cannot leave the body they have already possessed on their own. It's even implied that a demon dies for good once the undead does, whereas demons who possessed living abominations (including animals or trees, forming creatures like werewolves and sylvans) can still use the remainder of host's lifeforce to eject themselves back to the Fade. Thus, demons possessing skeletons are driven insane, spending their time in slumber to conserve their energy, until someone living comes up and they try to kill it.
  • Unlike the zombies, which are always recently possessed, and so the demon inside still has enough power to cast basic buffs (rage demon)/ debuffs (hunger/sloth demon), the skeletons lack the magical power to do anything but attack in melee or at range with whichever weapons their hosts used to have in life. However, they compensate for that through using that weapon's class abilities - whether learning them on their own, or somehow assessing that from the host's (muscle?) memory.
  • The one exception are Arcane Horrors and Revenants, which is what happens when the elite desire and pride demons still manage to make the terrible mistake of possessing a dead body. The former have possessed dead mages, and can deploy the most powerful spells in the game. The latter possessed sword-and-shield warriors, and their only power is the ability to instantly pull their attackers to them from great distances...and the extreme health and damage output.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Sword-wielder Skeleton enemies have made frequent appearances since Dragon Quest.
  • Dragon Quest III: After you kill Baramos, you fight his reanimated bones near the end of the game. They have no special abilities whatsoever and do nothing but attack repeatedly.
  • Dragon Quest VII: Maeve's true form is a skeleton knight.
  • Dragon Quest XI:
    • After stealing the Sword of Light, Mordegon uses his magic to transform it into the Sword of Shadows, a large greatsword made from bone. In his One-Winged Angel form, he becomes a giant, skeletal serpent with the Sword of Shadows becoming an actual dragon that serves as his "tail".
    • Tyriant is a skeletal monster wearing heavy armor.
  • Dragon Quest Builders 2: Griswold and Captain Whitebones are a Hargonaut and a Deadnaut respectively, two of the three types of skeleton knights.
  • Dragon Quest Heroes II: Twin Kings and the Prophecy's End: The King of Kadavra is a wight king.
• Dragon's Wake has numerous skeletal enemies, including the final boss.
• These are a supplemental unit in the Dungeon Keeper games, acquired by letting your POWs rot in jail. In the second game, cutscenes featuring skeletons reveal them to have retained their ligaments so as not to fall apart, as well as a single eye. (No eyes or ligaments are visible on the skeletons in the first game, but then again, the graphics of the nineties didn't allow for such levels of detail.) They also tend to have dreadlocks.
• In Dwarf Fortress, a common sight in evil biomes are procedurally generated skeletons of the local wildlife. With the absurd amount of detail in the game, it's pretty smart about how the tissues work — wherever possible, it rots away everything but the most essential ligaments needed to keep things connected together, and creatures that had exoskeletons in life become hollow exoskeletons in death. Also, skeletons are invariably amphibious and hostile to the living. If you embark on a hostile ocean with skeletal whales, prepare for "fun".
• With the exception of your ghost boss, Simmer, all your fellow undead "employees" in Dungeon Munchies are all sentient, talking, and intelligent skeletons. Most of them used to be zombies like the player character, until they were killed a second time and had all the rotting flesh torn from their bones by the local monsters.
• Dem Bones appear as mooks in Dungeon Siege.
• The Elder Scrolls series has skeletons as common low-level enemies in pretty much every game. They can use weapons, probably as an homage to Harryhausen. Plenty of variants exist:
  • Morrowind:
    • Bonelords are tall, four-armed, humanoid skeletons draped in brown robes who 75% resistant to all forms of magic other than fire. They also tend to cast a barrier spell as soon as they've been aggro'd which makes them resistant to melee damage as well.
    • Tribunal adds Liches, who are powerful spell-slinging skeletons in dark brown robes. They're complete resistant to frost and poison damage, and 50% resistant to shock damage. Like Bonelords, fire can still ruin their day.
    • Bloodmoon brings Bonewolves, who are partially decayed undead wolves who Downplay it by still being rather fleshy.
  • Besides the leveled Skeleton variants, Oblivion also has Dark Guardians, which serve the Dark Brotherhood. They're tougher than normal skeletons, but their main distinguishing feature is the hoods they wear. Shivering Isles has Shambles, which are made of the bones of a bunch of different creatures held together by leather straps.
  • Skyrim's skeletons appear in various necromancer hideouts and Draugr crypts, though they're pretty pathetic overall, save for the really tough ones.
    • A skeletal dragon appears as an encounter during the College of Winterhold questline during the quest "The Staff of Magnus." It's stupidly weak to magic (100% weakness) and flightless, so using flame spells should get rid of it easily.
    • Dawnguard has a few tougher skeleton variants, such as ones dressed in Ancient Nordic armor or others that resemble the Dark Guardians from Oblivion called Corrupted Shades. The main quest of the expansion also involves a trip to the Soul Cairn, home of the Bonemen, Mistmen and Wrathmen. You can learn to summon all three if you find the spell tomes lying around.
    • In the quest "The Break of Dawn" for the Daedric Prince of Life Meridia, the Dragonborn must clear her temple of Corrupted Shades, the ghostly skeletons of Stormcloaks and Imperial soldiers, commanded by the evil necromancer Malkoran (who himself turns into one after he dies). Being skeletons, the Unrelenting Force shout merely stuns them and they pack a serious punch, especially to the unprepared.
• Fernando from the Source Engine mod Elevator: Source who stands at the back of the elevator until he gets dragged off by a giant hand and later returns as an Asian man.
• Elliot and the Musical Journey: The Mooks of the game mainly consist of skeletons, since the Big Bad is the Skeleton King.
• In EverQuest they are everywhere - crawling out of the woodwork, wandering around in the woods, hanging out under the water waiting to grab your ankles as you swim by. Necromancers can even have them as pets. Heck, there's even a skeletal band in Paineel.
• Evil Islands: The skeletons from the Dead City.
• Exit Fate has Derek, a 200-year old skeleton knight who joins your army after you've aided a (friendly) necromancer in raising him. He's pretty jovial about it. He's also Australian for some reason.
• EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist gives enemy and friendly examples. Skeleton enemies populate Blackberry's pyramid, defending it from thieves by kicking and endless amount of bones. In Coma's route, she's accompanied by Slumber - a dapper Friendly Skeleton dressed in a tuxedo and top hat who assists her in her mission.
• Eyra the Crow Maiden: One enemy in the game that Eyra faces are skeletons that walk back and forth.
• Skeletons, Wraiths and the rare enemy Skull Lord in Fairune 1, of which Skeleton and Skull Lord return in Fairune 2.
• The DLC "Old World Blues" of Fallout: New Vegas provides us with the Trauma Override Harness automated suits, which were designed to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield by taking over their motor functions; however due to several malfunctions, they end up wrecking havoc and killing anything on sight while still carrying inside the long-dead skeletons of their previous users, which were trapped in them.
• The second and eighth Fire Emblem games are unusual among their franchise in that they have monsters for enemies, including weapon-wielding skeletons.
• Final Fantasy XII has the Skeleton-type enemies, which you can encounter as early as Barheim Passage if you fail to keep the Mimics from draining the power source. More powerful types emit light from their bodies, with the most powerful, Dark Lords, emitting purple light. There are also skeletal variants of the plate wyrm enemies.
• The Final Fantasy Legend/SaGa'' games feature families of skeletal monsters, which all dress as pirates for some reason. They mostly appear as enemies, but can also be recruited into your party, or existing monsters in your party can transform into them.
• Forge Quest: In the first dungeon (which is a dream you're having), you battle living skeletons wielding swords and shields.
• In Fran Bow, you get to meet a suave, top hat-wearing skeleton called Itward who has befriended many of the children from Oswald Asylum, has demonstrated he can easily travel around the Ultrareality, and is implied to be powerful enough to kick Remor's ass out of the Third Reality when the demon was trying to prevent Fran from leaving the asylum. Itward is a lovable guy who becomes a Big Damn Hero to Fran twice over the course of the game.
• Ghoulboy: One enemy type encountered in the game is skeletons that fall apart when beaten.
• Ghoul Gring Night Of The Necromancer: One of the enemy types Nox and Veronica face in the game are skeletons.
• Giana Sisters DS: Enemy Ghosts are flying, humanoid three-headed skeletons.
• Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance has the Spartoi enemies, skeletons who used to be fallen warriors, whom are everywhere in the second stage. There's also skeleton cyclopses as the Undead Counterpart of the game's existing cyclops enemies.
• Some of the Bonus content in God of War talked about how they wanted to put Dem Bones in the first game, in direct homage to Ray Harryhausen. Naturally, they appeared in the sequel, and first show up when you catch up to Jason and the Argonauts.
• The original Golden Axe has an army of skeleton swordsmen. The first one appears as the boss of the second stage and the rest are Elite Mooks. Golden Axe II also had skeleton warriors, while Golden Axe III has the Dead Frames, which are the reanimated skeletons of reptilian humanoids.
• Gothic has skeleton enemies wielding various weapons. Unlike many other games, these skeletons aren't pushovers — they're really dangerous swordfighters. There are also legless, floating skeleton mages. Gothic 2 adds weak goblin skeletons (who are nevertheless more dangerous than living goblins), skeleton shadowbeasts (the ordinary shadowbeast is already a very dangerous predator; these necromantic versions are even more threatening) and armor-wearing shadow warriors, who are pretty much mini-bosses.
• The most common enemy from Grabbed by the Ghoulies.
• Graveyard Shift 2: Skelly's Revenge has you playing as a milk-chugging, child-flinging, bugle-dooting skeleton. Yes, really. It is very much "Skeleton Memes: The Game."
• Grey: An Alien Dream: One of the enemy types Grey can encounter in his dreams is living skeletons.
• In keeping with its El Día de los Muertos theme, nearly all of the characters in Grim Fandango are skeletons. The rest are demons native to the Land of the Dead.
  • Technically they're calacas (see above), which accounts for their stylization.
  • The question of motor skills is lampshaded in Manny's conversation with a short-tempered clown:
    Manny: Some festival, huh?
    Balloon Guy: Yeah, my carpal tunnel syndrome's really acting up...
    Manny: But you don't have any tendons!
    Balloon Guy: Well you don't have a tongue, but that doesn't seem to shut you up, now does it?
• In Grow Cannon, you can find a giant skeleton leg, finding the rest of its bones will give it flesh and skin.
• Skeletal undead are seen in both the original Guild Wars campaign and the third campaign, Nightfall. However, they are still garbed in the armor or clothes they wore in life, which can add or subtract from their horror.
• Haunted Halloween '86: The Curse Of Possum Hollow: One of the first enemies you encounter in the game are skeletons that throw bones at Donny and Tami.
• Skeletons show up throughout the Heroes of Might and Magic series as the standard melee grunt for The Undead Necropolis faction, in normal and armored varieties. Heroes of Might and Magic III had a unique death animation for them, whereas they collapse on the ground, while their sword sticks in the ground with its handle straight up, just like a cross on a normal grave.
  • Meanwhile, the traditional top tier Necropolis unit is a skeleton dragon. Like most undeads, they tend to be weaker than their live version but come in greater numbers.
  • And of course, many of the Necropolis battlefield commanders are skeletons themselves.
• In A Hint of a Tint, it turns that Jezebel's Knights are this. They were the human males who would have died from thirst in that world, but were turned by Jezebel into fellow Vampires, preventing them from dying outright, but still subjecting them to desiccation, which they hide underneath their suits of armor.
• Skeletons appear among the enemies in Hype: The Time Quest. Similarly to the Dry Bones from the Mario franchise, they collapse into a pile of bones when defeated, only to get back up a little while later.
• There are many varieties of skeletons for you to fight in Hytale; wizards use magic against their foes, soldiers wear armor and carry swords, archers attack from a distance using bows, etc.
• In Insaniquarium, Bilaterus is a skeletal alien consisting of two heads connected by four spines. There is also Vert the Skeleton, a pet that drops golden coins for the player to collect.
• A skeleton serves as your guide in I Spy Spooky Mansion.
• Jitsu Squad have armoured skeleton enemies throughout the game. Appropriately enough, they debut in Castle Hellstrom, a Night of the Living Mooks stage as servants of Raven the Necromancer.
• The Bonefish and Skelterwild dream eaters in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] are skeletal variants of the Fin Fatale and Tyrant Rex dream eaters. The latter can be very troublesome to deal with due to the fact that its head detaches after it receives a solid hit and start attacking independently of its body.
• In Killer Instinct, a animated skeleton named Spinal who has a quirk: to perform certain moves, he must gather energy—represented by tokens shaped like skulls under his life bar (SNES version) or skulls floating around him (arcade and gold versions)—by absorbing opponents' projectile-energy attacks (with his shield in absorbing position) or performing combo breakers. Despite requiring these tokens, his special moves are no stronger than normal special attacks. Spinal can store up to five skull tokens, overloading if he tries to absorb energy for the sixth time. On the sixth attempt he will not block the projectile, and it will cause normal damage and knockdown; he will then be left with one remaining skull. Spinal has two No Mercy moves: one where he repeatedly stabs the enemy with a spike on his shield and another where he summons ghostly, skeletal hands to drag his opponent underground (in the SNES version, the latter became his summoning a bolt of lightning to strike his opponent).
  • Spinal was originally notable for being perhaps the only animate skeleton in fiction that is the product of science, not magic. However, it seems that the creators later figured out that movement without muscles is scientifically ridiculous and retconned his backstory to involve magic.
  • Spinal is also one of the Trope Codifiers for the high-pitched cackle a lot of skeleton characters are given when they are voiced, alongside the likes of Skeletor.
• Kingdom of Loathing has pet skeletons, misspelled skleletons, Spooky Pirate Skeletons, Misshapen Animal Skeletons... The list goes on. The introduction of the Angry Jung Man familiar and his psychoanalytic jars introduced a whole tower full of procedurally-generated skeletons which apparently exists in the mind of KoL creator Jick.
• King's Quest: Mask of Eternity: The skeleton guards in the Dimension of Death.
• La-Mulana is littered with the skeletons of many an Adventurer Archaeologist who failed to solve the puzzle of the ruins. Some hold helpful notes and items. Others get up and beat the crap out of you.
• Last Armageddon has a skeleton party member simply called Skeleton.
• Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain: Animated skeletons are encountered. Some of them walk in a fixed route and explode on contact with you. Others can pull themselves together and need to be destroyed more thoroughly.
• Legacy of the Wizard: Green skeletal knights called simply "Skeletons" are a fairly common enemy type.
• The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: After being cursed by Malefor for their shallow loyalty to him, the Apes are transformed into skeletal undead.
• The Legend of Zelda has both the floating skulls — Bubbles — and skeleton swordsmen — Stalfos — as common monsters. The dungeon boss Stallord from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a gigantic, non-human example.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Stalfos wander around in dungeons. They get upgraded to firing sword beams in the second quest.
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: Stalfos come in two varieties, red and blue. Blue Stalfos are stronger and can jump and down-thrust in midair.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: Stalfos are typically found in dungeons and caves. Trying to attack them will cause them to leap away, but they can be struck just when they land. Some Stalfos may also attempt to attack Link from above. There is also the Master Stalfos, a large boss Stalfos that is particularly dangerous.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had endlessly spawning Stalchildren that appeared in Hyrule Field at night, which grew larger the more of them you defeated.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has no Stalfos by that name, but Ikana valley is home to skeleton soldier mini-bosses that are practically Stalfos in all but name.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: Played with, as the games feature skeleton pirates who are good guys.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: The boss Skeldrich is basically a giant humanoid skull with an absurdly long neck.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has the Staldras — three-headed reptilian monstrosities from a bygone age whose heads must be destroyed simultaneously — and the Stalmaster — a four-armed and fully equipped Stalfos — in addition to regular Stalfos. The latter two do not screw around.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom: Skeletal versions of Bokoblins, Moblins, and Lizalfos can pop out of the ground at random much like the Stalchildren from Ocarina of Time, while the Stalnox, a skeletal Hinox, can be found as a boss monster. Hitting these enemies cause them to fall apart, but they will put themselves back together unless you destroy their heads first. There's also the Stalhorse, which you can ride at night but which disintegrates like the other Stal creatures at sunrise.
  • Hyrule Warriors: Stalchildren with their Ocarina of Time design appear as regular mooks. The larger weapon-wielding Stalfos, which likewise sport the Ocarina of Time design, appear as Elite Mooks. The four-armed Stalmasters from Skyward Sword also appear as Elite Mooks. In Adventure Mode, Captain Keeta appears in some battles on the Termina map.
• LEGO Jurassic World: Fitting with the paleontology focus of the franchise, the Minikits for this game unlock the ability to play as living skeletons of the dinosaurs, each level giving a skeleton for the dinosaur amber also found in it, and they function just as well as the fully alive ones despite lacking skin, flesh, and organs.
• Light Crusader: The only way you can kill this type of enemy is the "Turn Undead" spell or kill the wizard controlling them.
• Lucifer Ring have skeleton mooks in two varieties. The player first encounter regular-sized human skeletons in the mausoleum, which they defeat with ease, but later on they fight a Skeleton Knight King Mook as a boss. And in the battle against Bair the Evil Wizard, Bair will summon copies of the Skeleton Knight, but he's now a Degraded Boss who goes down easily.
• Mabinogi features no less than thirty-nine variants of the humanoid variety throughout Rabbie, Rundal, and Albey Dungeons, with 6 varieties of Skeleton Wolves for good measure.
• The Magicka series features loose enough magic that a combination of lightning, death, cold, and rock will produce six humanoid skeletons wielding swords and ready to kill on your behalf. They're even healed by arcane death beams!
• Magic Rampage: Skeletons makes an appearance. Later in the game, they wield magic.
• One of the customers of the Alice Shop in The Maid of Fairewell Heights is a Skeleton Soldier.
• In the 1990s PC fantasy kingdom sim Majesty, your Priestesses of the Death Goddess Krypta had the ability to re-animate skeletons for use as partners in combat; walking skeletons were sometimes also used as enemy monsters.
• Marco & the Galaxy Dragon has El Skeleton, an alien who looks like a skeleton and claims to be one. He’s actually flesh and blood, but can quickly heal from the most grievous wounds as long as his bones are intact.
• Freeware game Master of the Wind has skeletons wandering around the setting due to necromancers. Unusually some of these skeletons are sapient and just want to live in peace, something made rather difficult by overzealous clerics trying to grant them eternal rest. Shroud's partner Stoic is one of these.
• MediEvil gives us Sir Daniel Fortesque. A cowardly knight who died in the first hail of arrows, he's now been reanimated to take on Zarok. And he's the good guy! Although he got hit in the eye and killed, and is effectively a cyclops and has had his jaw decompose so he can't communicate without subtitles, he's still one tough cookie.
• Floating skulls are also in some of the Might and Magic games.
• Skeletons appear among the many, many enemies in Miitopia. Thieves can also by a skeleton suit, which invokes this trope.
• Millie And Molly: One of the types of enemies you encounter and defeat by walking into them in the game are dancing skeletons.
• Minecraft: Skeletons were one of the first mobs added to the game alongside zombies, and come in a number of variants. The basic skeleton comes equipped with a bow and can fire arrows, and is in fact programmed to move away from you when you get too close (instead of rushing you like other monsters do) to make best use of its ranged attacks. Like zombies, they can spawn wearing armor, which will improve their defense and can drop for you to use when they die, and catch fire and burn to death in the sunlight unless they’re wearing a helmet. Specific variants include:
  • Spider jockeys are a rare variant that spawns riding a giant spider. They can be quite dangerous, combining the skeleton’s ranged attacks with the spider’s melee and high speed.
  • Skeleton traps are another rare variant that spawns when a seemingly regular (but in fact specifically spawned for this trap) horse is struck by lightning, turning it into four skeletal horses mounted by skeletons wearing helmets. As the horses will not burn in sunlight or despawn and are spawned tamed, once you kill the skeletons you can ride them to net yourself a skeletal steed of your own.
  • Wither skeletons are taller, ash-grey skeletons that spawn in the Nether. They wield stone swords instead of bows and inflict you with the Wither status condition, which will steadily sap away at your health. Like all Nether mobs they’re immune to fire damage, and will thus not burn to death in the sun. They can also spawn as spider jockeys.
  • The Wither is a flying, three-headed skeletal monstrosity you can summon using three wither skeleton heads. It’s very powerful, it shoots explosive skulls, and it will try to kill every mob it sees that isn’t undead.
  • Strays are a variant of skeletons with glowing eyes and clad in tattered rags that only spawns in snowy biomes, whose arrows inflict you with the Slowness status effect. They, too, can spawn as spider jockeys.
• Minecraft Dungeons: The Minecraft skeletons are back to annoy you with their arrows. They also come in Necromancer and Nameless Guard flavors.
• Minty Fresh Adventure!: Since the dominant lifeform is ponies. The animate skeletons of them that appear, are also Non-Human Undead.
• Apogee's Monster Bash has skeletons as one of the common enemies. They throw what look like arms at you and break into two when you kill them.
• Monster Hunter (PC) has skeletons as flunkies of the warlock boss. They're invincible, since every time you blast them with a magic staff they fall apart before reforming in two seconds, with the only way of taking them down being defeating the warlock. Later on skeletons are the second stage of the difficult Mummy enemy - after a mummy is hit once by a magic staff, it sheds its bandages and turns into a fast-moving skeleton and pursues the player, who must run like crazy to collect another staff before they get killed.
• Monster Rancher 2. Dragon + Joker = Death Dragon.
• Montezuma's Revenge had rolling skulls as enemies.
• Undead ninja Scorpion from Mortal Kombat technically counts as this due to him being a burning skeleton undneath his ninja garb and flesh.
• Moshi Monsters has a Moshling species called "Creepy Crooners", who are singing skeletons.
• Mr. Bones: Another skeleton protagonist is the aptly-named title character in this Sega Saturn game.
• Skeletal Deadheads in Mutant Football League. They're generally on the speedy side and have a potent Healing Factor that make them extremely difficult to injure or kill, making them ideal running backs. The manual states that they're reckless daredevils (and party animals) who like to practice by running into brick walls.
• Mystery Case Files:
  • In the bonus gameplay from 13th Skull, the Master Detective finds the skullless skeletal remains of Captain Crown's crew. Placing their skulls atop of their head again will animate them, and they will get revenge on their captain after that.
  • The skeleton of the evaded prisoner in Shadow Lake will briefly wake up and attack the Master Detective before collapsing again right before hitting her.
• In NetHack zombies can be encountered from the very start, in the form of pathetically weak kobold zombie. Somewhat stronger kobold mummies appear a little later on, and there are a lot of zombie and mummy varieties in total, going up to giant zombies/mummies. In contrast, there's only one type of a skeleton, and it is stronger than even the giant mummy, being encountered in the late-game Orcus Town level, with the unique ability to steal speed from the player. However, a player strong enough to have reached Orcus Town in the first place is likely to find them little more than a nuisance anyway.
  • Liches are another, far more dangerous play on the trope. They can be rarely encountered from the mid-game onwards, which is one of the worst encounters a player can run into. Even a regular Lich can drain strength from the player, randomly curse their items (making it impossible to unequip worn weapons/armor, and severely worsening other items, to the point of making their use completely counterproductive) and worst of all, destroy armor outright, even if it's a very rare equipment. Luckily, they can only do these attacks in melee combat...which they compensate for through turning themselves invisible, and then casting haste on themselves, to make ranged combat without telepathy basically impossible. Oh, and they can heal themselves as well.
  • Moreover, there are three more Lich varieties. A Demilich is simply stronger and faster than the regular one, though it also knows how to draw all the other enemies on the level to your location. Master Lich is even stronger, and does this spell too, but also knows how to summon some of the strongest enemies in the game outright, and can teleport to the player, then teleport away when they are wounded to heal. An Arch-Lich knows all of this, and can insta-kill in close combat those who lack magic resistance. Even the game itself considers them the highest-difficulty monster one can randomly encounter.
    • All the properties Liches possess mean that most players choose to deal with them in another way entirely, and target them with a blessed Scroll of Genocide, completely removing all four Lich types from the game world, forever. The only tricky thing is in finding and properly identifying such a scroll in the first place: even if you know/suspect that they would cost a fortune when bought/sold, you may well end up with a poison cloud exploding in your face (not scary with poison resistance/game-ending without one), or even get punished with a ball and chain crippling your movement, at least until your god decides to help you after a well-timed prayer. Oh, and using a scroll of genocide to exterminate Liches (or nearly any other creature, really) without testing to see if it's cursed can end up with 4 Liches teleported to your location instead.
• In New Horizons:
  • The crew of the Black Pearl are skeletons.
  • Also the true form of the Maltese monks.
  • Who loots Cortez' treasure at Isla de Muerta and put the coins in their ship's locker, will too have an undead crew.
  • After sundown, a reckless traveler can encounter skeletal monkeys in jungles, outside of towns.

• The Lich class in Nexus War can raise skeletons as pets, or combine five skeletons into a fossil monster (essentially a bone golem). The Necrotic Tower, which was the home of the first Lich, is built entirely out of bone.
• NieR includes No. 6 and No. 7, the former of which is a rather distressing boss battle and the latter of which becomes a party member. Or more accurately, a party member becomes the latter...
• Both A Nightmare on Elm Street (PC) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (NES) feature living skeletons as minor enemies.
• Ninja: Shadow of Darkness: Skeletons are a reoccurring enemy you can encounter in the graveyard/ghost city and underground tunnels.
• Nitemare 3D had the skeletons that throw, um... flaming bones? ...at you. Which somehow hit their target instantaneously, unlike the blasts from your plasma gun.
• Nomolos: Storming the Catsle: Starting in the stronghold, Nomolos encounters skeleton enemies taller than he is.
• Nosferatu Lilinor is FULL of skeleton enemies. They can be temporarily defeated by hitting them, causing them to crumble. However, they can be permanently defeated by dropping them from a platform, or by having Zasha attack them.
• Of Love and Eternity: The body of the player character, an undead knight, has rotted to a skeleton, though he can still walk around, interact with the world and feel pain (physical and emotional). He's even still breathing given his breath mists, though he lacks the strength to climb.
• Persona 5: Party member Ryuji Sakamoto's eponymous Persona Fighting Spirit is a skeletal pirate standing atop a miniature pirate ship. Despite being nothing but bones and clothing, said Persona specializes in pure physical strength.
• Pillars of Dust: Bones is an animated skeleton mercenary who can throw their own bones and play dead to avoid damage.
• In Pillars of Eternity,
  • Skeletons are the end state of all corporeal undead, having degraded to a completely mindless state as they decay.
  • Liches in the same series are spellcasters who have avoided the mental degradation of the undead but not the physical, eventually ending up as this.
• Pirate Hunter has skeletal pirates (unsurprisingly) as an Undead Counterpart to the human pirate mooks. There's also a skeleton pirate captain as a boss.
• Pizza Vs. Skeletons: As the title implies, the game has a wide variety of skeleton enemies to defeat as a giant pizza.
• Planescape: Torment:
  • Morte, your first ally, is a wise-cracking, floating skull. Inexplicably, he has unrotted eyes in his sockets, no doubt preserved through his sheer will to roll them at every opportunity.
  • Being based on a Dungeons & Dragons setting with a heavy emphasis on death and unlife, the standard Dem Bones from the source material also exist in the game. As the necromantic Dustmen repair the bodies of decaying zombie slaves, eventually they are reduced to Dem Bones, held together with iron and leather.
  • Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Dranoor features a skeletal dragon as the Big Bad.
• The Free-to-Play TCG/tactics game Pox Nora features skeletons as one of the main race types in the Forsaken Wastes faction. Fully skeleton-themed decks are viable and typically play as a horde of expendable lesser skeletons backed by powerful mages, tomb lords and the occasional skeletal ice dragon.
• Primal Light: Skeletons are an enemy type Krog faces in the game. They bleed when struck (which shouldn't be possible, because, you know SKELETONS), and explode in a shower of bones upon defeat.
• Like Dry Bones, skeletons in Prince of Persia don't tend to stay down for the count.
• Puyo Puyo features two playable characters, Oshare Bones and Skeleton T, who happen to be animated skeletons. Neither of them are terribly threatening.
• Quake III: Arena has AI opponent and player model Bones. The manual idly wonders where the blood comes from when you shoot him.
• Raging Blades have two different varieties of skeletons; Horned Humanoid skeletons with tails which appeared first in the Cavern of Vortex, and the more common human skeletons in the Tower of Apocalypse. The human skeletons comes in two colours as well, yellow and white, though it's mostly just cosmetic.
• Raskulls stars the titular species, who all are skeletons. While every part of the body aside from their heads are obscured by clothes, making them look more like Skull for a Head, Magic Brick Wars introduces several characters that barerly wear anything, revealing that they are all bones.
• In Ravensword: Shadowlands, hostile skeletons absolutely infest the Citadel of Ror-Dan.
• Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale: There are sword wielding skeletons which come in white and yellow and drop Poison and Paralysis Crystals, respectively.
• A somewhat famous game of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 had a top hatted skeleton as the mascot of "Mr. Bones' Wild Ride", a Video Game Cruelty Potential-driven roller coaster so long it became a thing of horror. Naturally, it has become associated with the "Spooky Scary Skeletons" song and the "2spooky" meme.
• RuneScape has the expected basic human skeletons as enemies, as well as giant ones, a skeletal hellhound, skeletal wyverns (dragon-creatures), disembodied giant skeletal hands and an eldritch skeletal horror made of the bones of multiple creatures.
• The Castlevania-inspired side-scroller, Rusty, features Skeletons as soldiers, pikemans, and magicians.
• Animated skeletons appear as enemies in Episode 1 of Scooby-Doo! First Frights.
• One of the most common enemies in Serious Sam series is a skeleton of the Kleer alien species (which was rendered extinct by the Big Bad Mental, then revived in its entirety as the mainstay of his army) - a horse-sized four-legged creature that charges at you while also somehow finding the time to roll two steel balls on a chain straight ahead of itself. II also has bone snakes.
• One of the varieties of Fryhtans in the Seven Kingdoms series are skeletal warriors called "Deezboans".
• Slashout have skeletons in the second stage, set in a haunted hill, where you must cross a graveyard to the boss' mansion.
• ShadowCaster: An early area features red-boned skeletons hung up on poles. Drawing near causes them to animate, whereupon they attack the player with sword and shield.
• Shadow Hearts Covenant features an enemy called Agony that appears in the Gallery of the Dead. Its bestiary says it is a skeleton built and animated by a ghost of a child. Abandoned when the child's soul passed on, it now despises all humans with an anger born of deep sadness.
• The Fiend tribe of demons in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, including the Four Horsemen (Red, Black, White, and Pale Riders,) Mother Harlot, Matador, David the Violinist, the Trumpeter of the Apocalypse, Daisoujou the Monk, and the Hell Biker, among others. They're usually among the most difficult foes you will ever encounter in each game. Shin Megami Tensei being what it is, you can also enlist them as allies against greater foes.
• The Sims has a skeleton maid named Bonehilda, first introduced in an expansion of the first game, which players can purchase and will autonomously clean their Sims' houses. She's also a fan of The Grim Reaper and will try to get an autograph from him if he shows up. Visiting Sims can freak-out if they see her though.
• The Simpsons: Bart vs. the World: The final Hollywood level contains skeletons that throw their skulls.
• The first two Sinjid games featured skeletons as fairly uncommon enemies.
  • Battle Arena has the lowly Gel Skeleton and its stronger variants, the Skeleton, the Golden Skeleton, and the Titanium Skeleton, and their main method of combat is beating the player to a pulp. Their attack patterns are fairly simplistic, but they make up for it with fast attacks that can easily shut down approaches if the player isn't quick on the draw.
  • Shadow of the Warrior has Skeletons who use weaponry and shields in combat as opposed to their predecessors' bare-handed fighting style, and Skeleton Mages, who had low health and physical power but made up for it with their magic abilities and durable cloaks. The former are fairly weak on their own, but are always found assisting other monsters in battle, making it easier for their allies to take you out, and the latter are fairly menacing when cloaked, but drop quickly once uncloaked.
• In Skate 3, Dem Bones is the name of a playable character model in free-skate mode. He is unlocked after completing half of the Hall Of Meat challenges in the career.
• Skeletal Avenger: The Player Character is a recently-revived skeleton traversing a dungeon, battling monsters along the way.
• The Skeleton: The main threat of the game is the titular skeleton out to kill you with a sword (or a chainsaw in the appropriately named mode).
• Skeleton Boomerang: The vast majority of enemies in the game are skeletons of various creatures.
• The protagonist of Skul: The Hero Slayer is this.
• Skylanders:
  • Numerous Undead Skylanders are skeletal in nature.
    • Chop Chop who is introduced in the first game was made as a result of a fusion of Undead magic and technology, making him a skeletal knight complete with Knightly Sword and Shield.
    • Giants features the Undead elf called Fright Rider and his skeletal ostrich Ozzy.
    • Trap Team introduces a skeletal dog known as Funny Bone.
    • SuperChargers has a more elaborate version of this in the form of Fiesta, a Friendly Skeleton trumpeter based on the Day of the Dead.
  • However, numerous enemies from the Land of the Undead are skeletons, like archers known as Bone n' Arrows, and Undead Spell Punks beyond the first game can summon skeletal versions of common enemies like Trolls and Greebles.
• The cave complex in Spelunky often has piles of bones scattered around; some of them can re-animate as skeletons as you approach them. Luckily, a single Goomba Stomp or even a whip strike is enough to put them down again.
• Skull & Crossbones, a pirate-themed adventure game, appropriately enough have skeletons in one level, rising out from the sands as the player reaches a beach.
• Sol Divide has flying skeleton enemies as a recurring enemy type.
• Skeletons, usually armed with a sword, are the most common enemy in Spirits & Spells.
• Stardew Valley features skeletons as monsters encountered in floors 70-80 of the mines, there are also variants like "dangerous" and a mage skeleton on higher difficulties. On the Spirit's Eve holiday Marlon will have a few of these on display in a cage, and Sebastian will wonder what "trick" they are using to make them move.
• Hiante from Star Stealing Prince is a more friendly example than most; a skeletal soldier formerly of the Original King's army raised from the dead to protect Astra.
• The main character of Sunset Overdrive hallucinates being attacked by skeletons (among other things) after being covered in leeches and taking an entire bottle of medicine.
• Super Benbo Quest involves an invasion of skeletons from hell led by a giant floating skull. All the enemies in the game are skeletons.
• Super Dungeon Bros: The enemies you face in Cryptheim are skeletons. There's the standard skeleton Mooks, archer skeletons, and even much larger heavily armoured skeletons.
• The Super Mario Bros. series has multiple skeletal enemies.
  • Dry Bones are skeletal Koopa Troopas. Using the Goomba Stomp on them makes them collapse for a few seconds, and then they reassemble. Usually, you have to either make the head roll into lava or a pit, smash them some other way or make sure all of the enemies on screen are dead to beat them, depending on the game/series in question. Variations of this enemy included Dull Bones and Red Bones (both not as strong as regular Dry Bones) and Dark Bones (which are stronger than Dry Bones). They are also named for a line from the trope-naming song.
  • Bony Beetles are to Buzzy Beetles what Dry Bones are to Koopa Troopas. They can reassemble after being stomped, and can also collapse their skeleton exposing their sharp rib bones to defend against being stomped. Puzzle and Dragons: Super Mario Bros. Edition has a Giant Mook version called Big Bony Beetle.
  • Fishbones are skeletal fishes and immune to everything except invincibility.
  • And there's a part where Bowser gets Stripped to the Bone and reanimated as a Skeleton. Mario Kart Wii calls this "Dry Bowser". Most games present Dry Bowser and Bowser as separate characters (and in fact if Bowser gets afflicted by X-Ray Sparks, his skeleton doesn't even look like Dry Bowser!) but Mario Party 10 and Bowser Jr.'s Journey once again depict him as a skeletal Bowser.
  • In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, along with the introduction of the other members of the "Bones" family (Dull, Red and Dark), a Superboss is featured in the form of a skeletal dragon named Bonetail, the eldest brother of Hooktail and Gloomtail residing in the bottom floor of the Pit of 100 Trials. It is considered to be one of the game's toughest bosses, carrying a hit point count of 200 and its breath attacks carrying various status ailments.
  • There's also Kingfin in Super Mario Galaxy, a skeletal shark with Glowing Eyelights of Undeath. That apparently summons robotic piranha fish.
  • New Super Mario Bros. Wii introduces the Spine Coaster, which takes you through the entire level by bone, complete with screeching.
  • Super Mario Odyssey introduces the Tostarenans, who are beings based on the calacas of Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Tostarena and The Sand Kingdom is itself a Super Mario counterpart to Mexico.
• Suzy Cube has the Dastardly Skulls, who stole all the gold coins from Castle Cubeton.
• Tak and the Power of Juju has the Dead Juju, an animated skeleton who likes partying.
• The Tales Series, such as Tales of Symphonia, has it's fair share of your standard skeleton mooks, but also has a recurring Superboss in the form of the Sword Dancer, a large, often Multi-Armed and Dangerous skeletal swordsman who lives to fight strong opponents.
• Team Fortress 2's love of adding more thematic holiday content to the game, especially on Halloween, means that the presence of NPC skeletons was probably inevitable. While they are internally called zombies (due to previously using the various zombie skins of playable classes), they're really nothing but (surprisingly realistically depicted) bones. They usually appear with a Sickly Green Glow, but occasionally skeleton swarms can be summoned by using magic spells, and will have a team-colored glow in that case.
• One of the first enemies in Epyx's Temple of Apshai is an animated skeleton.
• In Threads of Fate, one of Rue's monster forms that he can transform into is a skeleton warrior. It has a standard slashing attack while its special attack, is to... break down into a pile of bones (of course, pressing Triangle again makes Rue reattach himself). It does form a useful function in solving puzzles where he encounters it, as well as defense; the broken form is invincible against certain enemies.
• In Titan Quest, the color of the various skeleton enemies indicates their power, starting from the white ones in Greece, yellowed and brown ones later on, black ones in Egypt, and ending with the Gilded Skeletons in China.
• Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation features skeletons armed with swords. Many weapons are completely ineffective against them. A shotgun blast will knock them over temporarily, but, if you want to permanently destroy them, you'd better have the grenade launcher or the explosive arrows at the ready, or make them drop from a cliff. They can also follow Lara almost anywhere and have a tendency of sneaking up on her from the sides or behind, making for some great Jump Scares.
• Trine features skeletons as the primary enemies.
• Skeletons are a common foe in the Ultima series, but only gained the ability to revive continuously in Ultima VIII if the player did not kill them with the Grant Peace spell. Taken to ridiculous heights in the horribly broken Ultima IX, where a defeated skeleton would break into its component parts and could reform again if there were enough parts for a whole skeleton. Cue frantic body-part looting mid-battle in a game where inventory space was already at a premium, and the skeletons kept respawning whenever you returned to the area.
• Undertale:
  • Two of the first major NPCs you meet are Papyrus and Sans, a pair of comedic skeleton brothers. In spite of being skeletons, they wear clothes, eat food, and don't seem to be the least bit inconvenienced by the whole 'lack of flesh' thing.^note  In fact, they even seem to benefit from it. When Undyne asks Papyrus how he can stand Snowdin's cold, he replies it's because he doesn't have skin All of their attacks are shaped like bones, and Sans also uses Gaster Blasters, which are Wave-Motion Guns in the shape of animal skulls. Rather than the skeletons of humans, both are monsters that are that way naturally. The unlikeliness of this is lampshaded when Papyrus theorizes humans are skeleton monsters that evolved flesh.
  • Doctor W.D. Gaster may also be one, he's named after two fonts (Wingdings and Aster), and seemingly uses one of them in his dialog, not unlike the skeleton brothers. However, it's hard to tell since he's been Dummied Out and apparently stuck in the Void Between the Worlds as fragmented bits of data. There's also the "Gaster Blasters", which are draconic-looking skulls that shoot lasers, which Sans uses against the player in the Genocide Route.
• A great example is the Mysterious Lady from Uninvited. In the first floor hallway, if you try a door a mysterious woman appears with her back to you, "dressed like Scarlett O'Hara," and she seems completely harmless - if you're playing the NES version there's even a chipper "hey, a cute lady!" tune in the background. But if you do something to get her attention (trying the door again, hitting her, trying to open her) she turns around and reveals her face: A bleached white skull, "devoid of any flesh"! The only way to get rid of her is to find a bottle labelled "no-ghost" in the upstairs closet, and even then you have to make sure to have the bottle open before even meeting her. Otherwise, nothing happens and she kills you. With this, and the fact that she's the first thing that can kill you in the game (unless you lingered too long in the wrecked car) and thus, your first death, she's pretty much become the game's mascot, even appearing on the NES version's cover art.
  • "Thank you for coming back for me, my love. You will be mine forever."
• Unworthy features the Frozen Giant - a very tough skeleton about twice as tall as the Player Character, and who attacks by creating two kinds of ice shockwaves and can also stand still and electrify himself for a while, making it hazardous to attack him. Luckily, he's a singular miniboss.
• Vagrant Story: Skeletons are common undead enemies found in Lea Monde. They are remarkaly fast and favor hit and run attacks to make up for their general fragility.
• Venture Kid: In the castle, Andy will encounter skeletons as enemies. Some of them wield spears that they'll point at Andy if he gets too close to them.
• Village Monsters: Stapes, the town guard, is a living skeleton.
• Warcraft:
  • Warcraft 3 has several variants: a melee skeleton, an archer, a mage (without any spells, just a magic attack) and an orcish version (used in the campaign only). Frostwyrms are also basically skeleton dragons, and ghouls are half-way between skeleton and zombie. The Lich hero is also a skeleton, albeit much more powerful and with a free will (the above examples are mindless undead slaves). Death knights also use skeletal horses. Similar to the Diablo example above, a Necromancer using the Raise Dead skill creates two humanoid skeletons from any sort of corpse. Even something like a Crypt Fiend (half-spider) or a wolf. In the Frozen Throne expansion, the Scourge shop sells staves that allow any Hero Unit to raise skeletons as well.
  • Obviously, these types (minus the orc version) made it into World of Warcraft as common monsters, as well as NPC necromancers which can summon them. No such class skill exists, although the first Hero Class, the Deathknight, comes close with summoning Ghouls. Unlike the RTS, these can only be raised from humanoid corpses or using Corpse Dust which can be bought from vendors. Better not to think about that one too much.
  • World of Warcraft has a large amount and diversity of Dem Bones, from typical meleeing mooks, to spellcasting mooks (often referred to as Bonecasters), to more elaborate skeleton mooks such as Bone Golems with their scythe hands, as well as many unique skeletons (including one rare mob who can return from the dead if not killed fast enough and is therefore rather hard to kill), and some Skeleton bosses, as well as Liches of course. The newly introduced Lord Marrowgar tops most of them, being a 10 to 25-man boss in the hardest raid so far (though an early one), and is basically a floating mass of bones with 4 heads armed with a massive bone axe.
  • World of Warcraft also features some Dem Bones noncombat pets. To wit, the collector's edition pet Frosty, a baby Frostwyrm, and the Ghostly Skull. A skeletal steed is the racial mount for the Forsaken, and archaeologists can assemble both a full sized fossilized raptor to ride and a small noncombat pet version.
  • With some Noggenfogger Elixir and a bit of luck, you can become one too! ^note If you do that you'll no longer need to breathe!
• Skeleton enemies appear sometimes in the Wario Land series, with the skeletal ghosts in Wario Land 4 and the aptly named Recapitators in Wario Land: Shake It!. The former shoot some kind of ectoplasm that turns Wario into a zombie, the latter actually use their head as a boomerang, and reassemble if destroyed with the head intact.
  • Wario World's Horror Manor has enemies that are skeletal versions of the enemies from the first two levels.
• In the arcade game Warzaid the objective is to stop these from taking over the world.
• In Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, the Dire Wolf turns the player character into an animate skeleton, so that they can complete their task no matter how long it takes. Regular people don't seem to perceive this change, though some can sense a dark aura in you.
• Will Rock: Living skeletons from both roman legionnaires and centaurs are met.
• One species of goo in World of Goo confuses the Sign Painter as to whether they're "alive... or dead. Probably polite to pretend we don't notice." These skull-shaped goo are the only species invulnerable to the ubiquitous Spikes of Doom.