People faking their deaths in video games.
- Army of Two allows you to use the "Feign Death" command if your mercenary is getting hammered with a lot of incoming fire. This generally causes the enemy to direct their fire at your partner, giving you either time to (slowly) heal or a chance to spring up and go for cover. Naturally, the enemy will only fall for this once per encounter, and keep shooting you if you try it again.
- In Batman: Arkham Origins, the questline where Batman explores the death of Gotham architect Cyrus Pinkney eventually reveals that Pinkney faked his death with the help of Amadeus Arkham, then got Revenge on his arch-enemy Henry Cobblepot.
- Battle for Wesnoth: While originally an Endless Game, starting from version 1.16 forward, Descent Into Darkness final scenario, "Endless Night", can be ended by having an enemy unit pick up Malin Keshar's book: he'll pretend that the book is his Soul Jar and make the cave entrance crumble after the heroes leave, so that he can finally find some peace and occasionally send his ghosts to kill orcs.
- BioShock:
- Atlas is actually mobster Frank Fontaine who supposedly died in a shootout with Rapture police forces 2 years before the game is set.
- Some splicers pretend to be corpses so they can leap up and attack you by surprise.
- In Bravely Second, as Nikolai is actually The Mole for the Empire, the last thing he wanted was to fight Yew, so he faked his death at the hands of the Empire to try and persuade Yew to abandon his crusade against said Empire and live his life in peace. Unfortunately for both men, it only strengthened Yew's resolve.
- Celestial Hearts: Ruth and Gwen supposedly pulled a Heroic Sacrifice to save their party from the self-destructing Eye of Destruction. After the fourth arena bout, the Halonian Knight team reveals that Ruth and Gwen actually survived, but never told anyone so they could retire from fighting.
- Command & Conquer:
- Pulled by the entire Global Defense Initiative in the first game, goading the Brotherhood of Nod into going on the offensive. Even the player gets suckered into it.
- Kane pulls this off in the third game, announcing his return by flipping out and ordering the player to nuke Sydney, Australia. And at the end of Kane's Wrath, Nod apparently pulled this off until Kane's Gambit Roulette finally pays off.
- In The Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush Threepwood needs to convince a local inkeeper that he is a member of the Goodsoup family and then feign death in order to cash in his life insurance policy (which only requires him to present his death certificate, regardless of whether or not he's actually alive) and gain admission to the Goodsoup family crypt, which technically isn't the cleverest way to go about doing either of those. His means of faking his death aren't that clever either: he mixes medicine with alcohol and passes out. And then the credits roll. Okay, not the REAL credits.
- Discworld II puts a bit of a twist on it: one puzzle requires Rincewind to fake being undead (something currently very common, due to the game's Death Takes a Holiday plot) to receive a death certificate and get transported out of Ankh-Morpork. The player needs to find some way to present no breath, pulse or body temperature while being examined by a mortician.
- In Disney's Hades Challenge to get to the Underworld you have to be dead, so in order to rescue Phil you use a potion to fake Charon out.
- Similar to the below Hitman example, one of the Dark Brotherhood missions in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has the player "kill" an NPC with a special poison and revive him later to throw other assassins off his trail.
- In classic EverQuest, the Feign Death skill was the hallmark of the Monk class (though some other classes eventually received weaker versions of it) and was the most effective countermeasure for a number of the game's more tedious and frustrating mechanics.
- Princess Ashe of Final Fantasy XII faked her own suicide two years before the game, after the death in battle of her husband Rasler and the surrender and subsequent murder of her father King Raminas. She did this so that she could become a Rebel Leader and head of the Government in Exile fighting against the empire which conquered her kingdom.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, you witness Sultana Nanamo ul Namo succumbing to a poisoned wine and you and the Scions blamed for her murder at the end of Patch 2.55. However, partway through the Heavensward expansion, you learn that One of the Monetarists, Lolorito, learned of the assassination attempt and had the poison replaced with a potion that put her in a deep sleep. He helps you revive her and clear everyone's names, but he walks away scot-free as he had a hand in a lot of the things that happened before and because of it and wouldn't help them if he were punished.
- Fire Emblem:
- The Black Knight from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is revealed to have done this in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, although they Never Found the Body. Still, they dropped a fucking tower on him; No One Could Survive That!!
- Prince Zephiel is poisoned in an assassination attempt by his father, King Desmond, but survives. He arranges a fake funeral and stabs his would-be murderer to death when Desmond approached the coffin to view the body. The exact details of this incident are revealed in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade but they are mentioned in the epilogue of Prequel Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, suggesting that they happened around that time (fifteen years after the events of The Blazing Blade and five years before The Binding Blade).
- Fire Emblem: Awakening:
- Khan Basilio pretends to be dead after attacking Walhart, and then shows up alive in a Big Damn Heroes moment against Validar and co. Somewhat subverted in that this is how Basilio actually died in the Bad Future, but after Lucina explained this "detail", he "fixed" it in the present.
- Subverted with Emmeryn if you play her Paralogue. She isn't actually faking the dead; she survived her Heroic Suicide but was left with massive Trauma-Induced Amnesia, so she can't remember anything from her life before said Heroic Suicide. (It is speculated in fandom that she MAY have intended to play the trope straight, but yeah.)
- Zig-zagged in Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. Yomiel pretends to be killed by Lynne to frame her for murder. The twist is that he's a ghost who was animating his dead body. Pretending to be alive, then faking his "death" by letting his body go back to being dead.
- In Grand Theft Auto V, Michael Townley fakes his death with the help of FIB Agent Dave Norton, after a bank robbery gone awry. Afterwards, he and his family move to Los Santos under the surname 'De Santa'. The plan works, but nearly a decade later Michael unintentionally reveals to his best friend Trevor Phillips that he's alive.
- In Halo, Flood Combat Forms will try to pull this on you in Halo: Combat Evolved, dropping dead to the ground only to jump to their feet moments later. It can be difficult to tell when they are genuinely dead due to this, and the only real way to ensure they are is to watch them for a moment or punch/pump them full of lead.
- The "Murder on the Owl Express" level of A Hat in Time ends with the victim revealed to be alive no matter which of the Multiple Endings you pick.
- This is a major gameplay element in Haze: Mantel Corporation mercenaries have a Fantastic Drug called Nectar injected into their bodies which gives them superhuman abilities and alters their brain chemistry to make them more useful for Mantel. One way they do this is trying to avoid PTSD by making Mantel troops incapable of seeing dead bodies. Once a soldier, friendly or enemy, dies, they become incapable of perceiving them. This is extremely easy to abuse once you make the inevitable switch to the anti-Mantel rebels; with the push of a button your character pretends to die, and the bad guys literally forget that you're there.
- Henry Stickmin Series: One of the early options for Henry in Fleeing the Complex is to play dead. It gets him thrown out the trash disposal to his actual death. The "Presumed Dead" ending also plays this trope straight, as the Warden thinks Henry chose to fall to his death instead of surrendering, when he clung to the side of the cliff and waited till the guards left to escape. In Completing the Mission, this ending can be combined with the four endings from Storming the Airship to create four different events: either reuniting with Charles to destroy the Toppats' space station at the cost of Charles' life, hijacking the space station and turning it into a fancy space resort, becoming a professional bounty hunter or saving the Toppats from a secret ambush by the army.
- Hero King Quest: Peacemaker Prologue: When Spidervenom refuses to be a pawn in Spidergland and Spiderweb's political rivalry, Spiderweb takes Spidervenom's Mark of the Crown Princess and pretends the Cerulean Land tortured her to death. This allows Spiderweb to use the princess's supposed death to make her an Inspirational Martyr, giving the former a chance to rise to the throne. Spidervenom uses her newfound freedom to become the main antagonist of Peacemaker: Glorious Princess.
- Hitman: Blood Money:
- This happens to Smith in order to sneak him out of rehab.
- The Agency sets up a false death for 47 so that he can get close to the mastermind of the plot to kill him that drives the main plot of the game. When Diana gives him a kiss, she's administering the antidote for the drug that she used on him (though if you let your life bar go down all the way during the "credits", it's Game Over for you).
- Ice Age 2: The Meltdown: Early on, there's a minigame where you have to sneak past sleeping Diego. If he stirs, you need to instantly fall down and play dead.
- Inazuma Eleven
- Ichinose suffered a bad accident in his childhood when he jumped on the road in front of a car to save a puppy, leading Aki and Domon to believe that he had died, but he gets better with medical treatment, enough to become a football legend in America and visits his friends in Japan to show them that he's alive. He told his father to tell them that he had died because he didn't want them to see him depressed.
- Daisuke, Endou's long-thought deceased grandfather, turns out to be alive in the third game.
- Asuto's mother told him that his father moved overseas for a job and died in an accident, but he actually left the country to chase his soccer dreams and she couldn't go with him overseas, so she kept the truth about his father a secret. Asuto receives a letter from his mother where he finds out the truth and becomes more determined to continue to win the Football Frontier.
- Knight Eternal: In the final segment of the game, Uno and Dylan are captured by the Zamastian soldiers, and Dylan finds Uno dead while surrounded by the corpses of several guards. However, it turns out the corpse belongs to the butler that Uno was disguised as.
- The normal ending of The Legend of Tian-ding has the titular hero getting killed by his protégé who mistook him to be one of the Les Collaborateurs, but there's a secret good ending where he actually survives via Pocket Protector. The remaining resistance - and the country - mourns his demise, and gave him a proper burial, but in the final cutscene he then appears before his Love Interest, very much alive.
- Lost Eden has several examples:
- Moorkus Rex fakes the death of Mungo, Dina's lover, in an attempt to invoke a Heroic BSoD in Adam and company.
- Adam's mother and sister both escaped from the Tyrann raid to Shandovra, where Adam's sister changes her name to Shazia and became queen of the Chorrians.
- In Mafia II, Henry has to kill Leo Galante to get into the Falcone crime family. Vito tries to get Leo out before Henry can whack him, but when Henry catches them and learns the facts, Leo offers to take the bullet. Vito leaves the kitchen, there's a gunshot, and Henry walks out, telling him "You owe me big for this one." Vito then drives Leo to the train station so he can leave Empire Bay.
- Mass Effect:
- If loyalty was secured back in Mass Effect 2, Kasumi will turn out to have survived the explosion of the rigged terminal of the mission "Citadel: Hanar Diplomat" in Mass Effect 3.
- Played with in Mass Effect 2. Shepard really was killed and brought back, but that information was known to only a handful of people. Everyone not aware of the Lazarus project, including most of Shepard's friends and allies, concluded that Shepard's death had been faked, and some were not happy about it. It is one of the biggest contributors to Shepard becoming a Hero with Bad Publicity.
- Metal Gear:
- Solid Snake fakes his own death in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, in order to escape being witch-hunted as a terrorist. Interestingly enough, he does this by dressing up the corpse of his identical twin and presenting him to the authorities. Thus, later in the game, when the body is exhumed for a DNA test, it passes as genuine.
- In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Snake carries a Cyanide Pill he can use to fake his death in front of enemies. "Dying" will fool every enemy and boss once, and popping back to life in front of them will scare them enough that you can get a cheap hit in; the only boss this doesn't work on is the one that taught you this trick.
- In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, there is the corpse camo and the Big Boss mask to complete it that allows Snake to play dead which can fool even the machines.
- In the red variation of Moonmist, we discover that Lord Jack Tresyllian attempted to kill his former fiancée, Deirdre Hallam, after murdering his uncle Lionel for his inheritance and fortune. However, she escaped Jack's clutches by jumping into the well in the castle basement and swimming her way to safety, thus faking her own murder and setting the one reason for "Never Found the Body"; she then masqueraded as the legendary "White Lady" in her effort to haunt Jack and her successor Tamara Lynd.
- The Nancy Drew game Lights, Camera, Curses! reveals that a famous actress's long-ago death was faked, to ensure that she wouldn't suffer the stigma of having done such a horrible acting job.
- Persona 5: In order to avoid the Bad Ending where he's murdered, the Protagonist exploits a phone equipped with the Metaverse app to remotely send his assassin into a section of his interrogator's Palace that looks like the real world and is inhabited by a mental projection of the main character. The assassin kills the projection, leaving the real Protagonist and his team free to track his would-be killer back to his employers.
- King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow: On the Isle of Wonder Alexander discovers a potion that puts the drinker into a death-like trance for about a minute. If the player uses it in the pawn shop, Alex will melodramatically pretend to commit suicide, which causes the Big Bad's genie spy to happily report to his boss that Alexander is dead, getting them off the player's back until the endgame.
- The starting novice class of Ragnarok Online can learn a Play Dead skill that renders all monsters non-aggressive by making the player out to be dead. They lose this skill when changing to a first class or supernovice, however.
- Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages has a Feign Death Device, which creates a hologram of you that gets blown up while you turn invisible and fly away.
- In Saints Row, the protagonist helps fake Aisha's death in order to get her out of her draconian contract with King Records. In the second game, it's revealed that she put out more "posthumous" albums in the five-year Time Skip between games, and somehow nobody (besides the protagonist and Johnny) figured out she was still alive... until she dies for real in this game.
- This plays a key role in Steins;Gate: to prevent the Bad Future from unfolding without sacrificing anyone, the heroes have to replicate a grisly scene that Rintaro glimpsed in a vision right at the start of everything. It's a bit of a Mind Screw how it all unfolds.
- In Suikoden II, the main character's not-quite-biological sister fakes her own death in order to avoid distracting him from his important task of ending a war — she's tired of all the fighting and wants to leave the war behind, but knows that he'd never leave her alone if he knew she was still alive. All this only happens in the perfect ending, however — if you make even the slightest misstep, before or after her apparent "death", she was actually killed off for good.
- In Super Robot Wars 30, the heroes learn that Char Aznable, Amuro Ray and Chan Agi were forced into doing this after the events of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack, having survived the events that got them killed. While they're happy about Amuro surviving, everyone is pissed Char did, too, because of what he did.
- Played straight in Team Fortress Classic: Spies could drop to the floor (much like dead players' ragdolls) at any time, quietly or otherwise, and go into third-person view.
- Team Fortress 2 Has the unlockable pocket watch for the Spy, the Dead Ringer. It creates a fake corpse the instant any damage is done to the user, and immediately makes the user completely invisible for a short period of time (not even bumping into other players reveals him, unlike the other two watches and the official reskins), at the expense of a really, really loud "becoming visible" sound effect. Naturally, like most of the Spy's tricks, it becomes much less effective against more experienced players, especially those backstabbed by a "dead" spy before. However, it has another use that can remain effective even against veteran players: the reduced damage. This can easily allow spies to survive otherwise inescapable situations, and is often considered the main feature of the item. This was even worse before the many Nerfs it received that disabled recharging it with ammo packs and dispensers and reducing it's damage reduction. Until it was finally nerfed to not recharge with ammo packs, a skilled spy with good map knowledge could easily survive several "deaths" and kill the enemy once they mistakenly assume the spy is Deader than Dead.
- In Triangle Strategy, Roland does this after Aesfrost invades Glenbrook to get Gustadolph's army off his trail, in two ways. Roland himself assumes Maxwell's identity, complete with his hat and Domino Mask, while Benedict puts Roland's signet ring on a random dead body to trick Travis and Trish into thinking it really is Roland.
- Early in Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, after Katherine Marlowe steals Drake's ring from our hero, Nate and Sully appear to get fatally shot by a disgruntled thug in front of her. After she leaves, assuming them to be dead and leaving the thug behind, it's revealed that the thug, Cutter, was working with Nate and Sully the whole time, and set up the act to throw their enemies off their tail with a fake ring, Nate still having the real deal. With them assumed dead, they could follow after them to the location they intend to use the ring.
- Flowey the Flower does this in Undertale in response to you choosing to kill him at the end of your first Neutral run. You can catch on to the deception by noticing that he's still stalking you when you backtrack in certain rooms, and the faker will reveal the deception directly if you defeat Asgore and get a Neutral ending again, or go for the True Pacifist ending. Zigzagged a bit in that you really did kill him; what he's faking is that he didn't get better when you reloaded. Since he's the only character other than yourself with full Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, you might have been tempted to think his death would persist the same way.
- The original Unreal Tournament had the feign death feature. This would later return in Unreal Tournament III. This was taken from Team Fortress.
- World of Warcraft has Feign Death as an ability of the Hunter class.
- Kazuma Kiryu at the end of Yakuza 6 chooses to fake his death and go into hiding rather than cut a deal with corrupt government officials to protect Haruka and her young family. He briefly comes out of hiding in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but only sticks around long enough to Pass The Torch to Ichiban before leaving again. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name shows that during this time he ended up becoming a government agent and over the course of the game it's shown that few people in the underworld actually believed that a Living Legend like Kiryu truly died from gunshot wounds (especially since he gets shot at least once per game). The ending also shows that the now-adult orphans of Morning Glory Orphanage, after finding a hidden camera at Kiryu's gravesite, now also believe that he must be alive.
- Yakuza: Like a Dragon gets... kind of ridiculous about this. Other than Kiryu showing up, the story starts with the protagonist himself being left for dead and turning out to be alive. Other people who appear in the story even though they are supposed to have died several games ago include Osamu Kashiwagi who now works as a bartender, and Lau Ka Long who is now a weapons dealer. And then in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Andre Richardson and Akane also turn out to be alive. In other words, excluding himself, Ichiban runs into five people who are faking the dead by the time he meets them. His class should have been Necromancer.
