Karmic Death / Video Games

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• Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
  • Champ, the most arrogant and egotistical member of the Spare Squadron, tries to pick a fight with Mihaly in the mission First Contact. Mihaly effortlessly blasts him out of the sky.
  • Full Band, who likes to gleefully Speak Ill of the Dead, lacks empathy, and brags about aquiring classified information, get his in Faceless Soldier. When the Spare Squadron is ambushed by AI controlled Erusean aircraft with spoofed Osean IFFs, they form an element on Trigger so that AWACS Bandog can recalibrate their IFFs. However, Bandog marks him as an enemy, leading to Count shooting him down. Quite a few people, both in and out of universe, think this was NOT an accident as Bandog claims.
  • In Transfer Orders, while it will lead to the mission failing, if the Eruseans or Trigger, shoots down Colonel McKinsey’s plane, Bandog will say that the cargo was not worth protecting.
  • In the final SP Mission Ten Million Relief Plan, Matias Torres tries to fake a surrender so that he can bide his time to line up a shot towards Oured. When Trigger throws off the ship’s trajectory, the LRSSG decide to just sink Torres to the bottom of the ocean, and he dies while laughing like a maniac.
• In Alice: Madness Returns, Dr. Bumby tries to erase Alice's memories and destroy Wonderland with the Infernal Train. After defeating him in the Wonderland, Alice takes revenge for everything he did (including raping her sister and setting her house on fire) by pushing him in front of an incoming train.
• Alan Wake:
  • The "kidnapper" meets an unpleasant and terrifying end at the hands of the forces of darkness, presumably for getting in the way of their plans by fucking with Alan. The revelation that all of his threats regarding Alan's wife were empty makes him only slightly more sympathetic as he's being mind raped by a supernatural entity of indescribable horror, but he was a Jerkass.
  • The man's boss, Dr. Hartman, was aware of the Dark Presence in the lake and wanted to control it so he could bend the world into his own image. For this reason, he sought to "acquire" Wake due to how the Presence seemed to be drawn to those with talents in creativity (such as writing, art, or music). He was the one who convinced Wake's wife to bring Alan to Bright Falls (under the pretence of helping him with his writer's block), set up the whole "Kidnapper" scheme, and later tried to make Alan think that he was a delusional patient under Hartman's care. His ultimate fate? Alan locks him in a room with the same Darkness the "Good Doctor" sought to control, and does so with a rather palpable degree of satisfaction. He's experimented on and horrifically mutated by two eldritch forces, not unlike the way he co-experimented with the Dark Presence on his patients, and put down by Jesse Faden in Control, who Alan manipulated into her promotion to the director of a paranatural task force.
• In Baldur's Gate, The initial Big Bad, Rieltar Anchev, killed his wife with a garrote for infidelity in front of their adopted son, Sarevok. Years later, he threatened his stepson with the same punishment if he ever "betrayed" him as Stepmom did. Sarevok, now with his eyes on Stepdaddy's position and who adored his stepmother, was sure to specify to the assassins he hired to kill Rieltar that they use a garrote when they did so.
• Batman: Arkham City: the Joker is done in via a Backstab Backfire leaving him to die from the Titan poison, which he injected himself with in the last game.
• Batman: The Telltale Series:
  • The final battle between Batman and Lady Arkham/Vicki Vale has the villain boast that he will die in an underground chapel, forgotten and buried by the public. The battle between the two ravages the chapel, made worse by Vicki's sonic weapons and, when she attempts to escape, she's crushed by fallen debris. To make things even more ironic, the following newscast reveals that they can't find her and they've just written her off as dead.
  • Lady Arkham kills her own foster parents, and Batman assumes the motive is that they had simply outlived their usefulness. However, he notices that she had beaten her foster father with a metal belt buckle before hanging him with the belt, so badly that he actually bled to death before the hanging killed him, and remarks that this is strange as the killer seemingly had no real reason to go out of their way to do this. In the following chapter, we learn that Lady Arkham's foster parents were extremely abusive and regularly locked her (and doubtlessly other foster children) in what was essentially a torture chamber beneath their house as a punishment. Said chamber features a lovely selection of men's belts hanging on a rack, the buckles of which are all caked in dried blood.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine:
  • There's Sammy Lawrence's death in Chapter 2. Sammy is a self-styled "prophet" of Bendy's. He believes that if he sacrifices Henry to Bendy, then Bendy will set him free. When he has Henry tied up and has summoned Bendy, Bendy kills him, as evidenced by Sammy's pleas and a puddle of ink that flows from under the door. Henry, on the other hand, breaks free and manages to escape from Bendy.
  • There's also Susie Campbell's death in Chapter 4. Susie was turned into a version of her beloved role, Alice Angel, before the start of the game. However, she was turned into a deformed version of the character and was obsessed with becoming a perfect Alice. In Chapter 3, she promises Henry that she'll help him get out of the studio if he helps her gather things she needs to become perfect. At the end of the chapter, she metaphorically stabs him in the back by sabotaging the elevator he and his friend Boris are in and Toon-napping Boris to be Reforged into a Minion. In Chapter 4, Henry is forced to kill Boris and Susie runs out with a knife to stab Henry. Just before she can do so, she herself is literally stabbed In the Back by Allison — who is a much more perfect version of Alice.
  • The moment Bendy finds Henry listening to Joey Drew's tape about his Weaksauce Weakness and holding said weakness in his hand, he takes an even more intimidating form and tries to kill Henry. He's still trying to kill Henry when Henry kills him.
• BioShock:
  • Doctor Suchong suffers a remarkably appropriate death. While pondering how to further improve the imprinting of the Big Daddies' programming to protect the Little Sisters, he gets annoyed by one of the little girls. Eventually, he loses his temper and slaps her. Jack finds his corpse, impaled on his own desk by a Big Daddy's drill.
  • Frank Fontaine, when posing as Atlas, encourages the player to harvest Little Sisters for their Adam and is ultimately responsible for their conversion from normal girls in the first place. After he goes One-Winged Angel by injecting an ungodly amount of Adam into his body, he is finally finished off by a group of Little Sisters harvesting all the Adam from his body with their needles. Furthermore, the Burial at Sea DLC for BioShock Infinite reveals that Fontaine's downfall was planned by Elizabeth, the same person he beat to death with a wrench. To add insult to his injury, you can literally beat Fontaine to death with a wrench.
• BlazBlue: Yuuki Terumi has been manipulating Ragna and making him suffer and hate for years. Therefore, it's only natural that Ragna is the one who finally kills him near the end of Central Fiction.
• The Roach Scientists from Bug Fables performed all sorts of horrific experiments on innocent bugs to further their quest for immortality. It was one of their own creations, Zommoth, that turned against them and killed them.
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow: The goal of the game's Big Bad, Celia, is to resurrect Dracula by using someone as a vessel for his power. In both endings, she succeeds...only to immediately get killed by the vessel in question (in the good ending, Dmitrii sacrifices her to increase his own powers; in the bad ending, Soma kills her for (seemingly) killing Mina).
• A variation is present in Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. Kyle disarms Jerec, but can't kill him in cold blood. So, he gives him back his saber, and when Jerec charges, cuts him down in self-defense.
• Dead Rising 3 features optional bosses representing the Seven Deadly Sins. When you defeat them, each dies in an ironic manner related to their sin.
  • The gluttonous Darlene, who used the Zombie Apocalypse to get her hands on as much food as possible, chokes to death on her own vomit.
  • Greedy Mad Doctor Albert gets stuck with a syringe of his own Psycho Serum, and in his resulting delirium proceeds to kill himself with the same surgical saw he extracted his victims' organs with.
  • Sex-maniac Dylan asphyxiates after breathing in too many noxious fumes from his crotch-mounted flamethrower.
  • Prideful female bodybuilder Jherii is crushed to death under the weight of the numerous trophies she's won over the years.
  • Wrathful Old Master Zhi commits suicide after being bested in combat by the protagonist.
  • Envious fanboy Kenny finally achieves his dream of fighting the protagonist, only to be devoured by a pack of zombies attracted by the battle.
  • And finally, the slothful and apathetic Gadgeteer Genius Theodore simply drops dead of a heart attack when he realizes the protagonist has actually managed to beat the absurd amount of defenses on his house.
• In Dead Space, Kendra, after crossing the Moral Event Horizon several times and revealing that Isaac is going insane, steals the ersatz Artifact of Doom that was stopping the monster from its base, thereby nullifying its power. Not five minutes later, said monster smashes her into paste.
• The final boss of Disaster: Day of Crisis, Evans, meets his end... at the hands of his own colonel, who actually survived being shot by Evans. Awesome.
• High Overseer Thaddeus Campbell, your first assassination target in Dishonored, can suffer one of these. He tries to make an honest and noble city guard captain drink poisoned wine, but you can switch the glasses around on the platter. In a Pacifist Run, he can suffer a Karmic Fate Worse than Death instead: knock him out and cart his body over the interrogation room down the corridor, and then brand his face with The Mark of the Heretic, and you will leave him shunned and reviled by the same Corrupt Church he set up.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  • In the beginning, there's an Imperial captain who sends you to your death, even though it was said that you were not on the execution list. If you escape with Ralof, she's the first NPC you kill. It's karmic because it's now you sending her to her death.
  • There's also Arondil, an Altmer Necromancer who kidnapped and murdered Dawnstar's milkmaids and then used his magic to raise them from the dead as Sex Slaves. The most satisfying and karmic way to dispose of this walking trash is to sneak into his quarters undetected and remove the grand soul gem standing on the pedestal next to his throne, and then sitting back to watch as his spectral concubines tear him to shreds.
  • Grelod the Kind is anything but. One of the children who suffered under her care can ask the Dragonborn (mistakenly believing them to be with the Dark Brotherhood) to kill her. The children in the orphanage rejoice at her death, and no one else in Riften is particularly sad to see her go. In fact, the guards won’t actually put a bounty on you for killing her, meaning you can literally kill her in front of the kids and no one will attempt to stop you. As a final nail in Grelod's coffin, her friend Constance Michel takes over the orphanage after her death, and she’s miles better than she ever was.
• In the beginning of Fable II, when your character is a child, Lucien fatally shoots your sister before shooting yourself, causing you to fall to your (supposed) death. At the end of the game, this is exactly how Lucien can die, either by your hand or Reaver's.
• Fallout:
  • In Fallout, Vault 13 Overseer Jacoren has three of these. First, there's the Non-Standard Game Over in which he's beaten to death by Super Mutants after the Vault Dweller surrenders to The Master. Next, there's the alternate ending in which the Vault Dweller shoots him In the Back after getting exiled, blowing off half his torso and leaving him to bleed out. Finally, there's his canon death in which the inhabitants of Vault 13 put him on trial and executed him for his actions. While it initially seems a bit disproportionate as he came across as a Reasonable Authority Figure, the sequel revealed that he was in on the Vault-Tec conspiracy (and by extension, in league with the Enclave).
  • In Fallout 2, a teenage scientist, Myron, invents and spreads Jet, a very addictive and dangerous drug that ruins many lives and absolutely destroys the economies of several communities (such as The Den and Redding). Said drug makes him and the Mordino crime family a fortune and establishes him as the wealthiest drug baron in the land. About a year after the defeat of the Enclave, he meets his demise in The Den at the hands of… a crazed Jet addict, and his role in the creation of Jet is completely forgotten. Not that he was particularly well-acknowledged for it before that.
  • In Fallout 3, after you've visited most of the rusty abandoned vaults and Vault-Tec headquarters and discovered the true purpose of the vaults and why they went horribly wrong, you have the chance to find a voice recording on an alien spaceship of the Vault-Tec CEO who masterminded the vault system and their true purpose; the recording shows the aliens kidnapped him and performed experiments on him, despite his sniveling attempts to be diplomatic.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • The Big Bad, Caesar, is the leader of a slavery-based, incredibly cruel, militaristic, and genocidal empire that invades the Mojave Wasteland. The empire, Caesar's Legion, automatically gives death or enslavement to numerous sections of the population: women, the physically handicapped, the ghouls, super mutants, the mentally handicapped, intellectuals, etc., but they especially look down on the sick for being too weak to live. As a result, Caesar banned all medical technology in his empire to let the sick die. However, it's later revealed that Caesar himself is a sick, old man dying from a brain tumor. If the player doesn't kill him first, or perform surgery on him to remove the tumor, it will end up killing him after the events of the game, and by his own rules, he'd deserve it for being too weak to live. Not that he didn't try using modern medical technology, mind you.
    • If Caesar indeed winds up dying either by your own hand or the brain tumour, then Ulysses, the Big Bad of Lonesome Road, comments that by the laws of the empire Caesar commanded and his own warped personal morality, he was a weakling that didn't deserve to live.
    • You can give the whole of Caesar's Legion a Karmic Death if your courier is female. By the end of the game, you can potentially assassinate Caesar, kill Lanius, slaughter the head of their intelligence operation and all of his bodyguards, possibly kill the intelligence head's replacement, wipe out their outpost at Cottonwood Cove, take out a small slaver camp, destroy various patrols, lead the NCR to re-take the Legion-controlled town of Nelson, thwart an attack on Bitter Springs, root out a Legion spy at McCarran, destroy both of their allies in the Mojave (Fiends and Omertas), sever their alliance with the Great Khans, arrange for an army of killbots hidden in a bunker under their main base to awaken on your command and wipe them out, and through careful political maneuvering cause every major faction in the Mojave to ally together against them. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
    • This line of thinking is actually used in-game on some of the NCR military's recruitment posters. "Women of the NCR: Every one of you who serves is a slap in Caesar's face!" and such. Doing certain things that screw over Caesar's Legion while playing as a female courier will also sometimes get special dialogue from NCR troopers where they mention the karmic aspect of it.
    • The "Gun Runners' Arsenal" DLC adds a challenge that players can complete for bonus XP by pickpocketing Benny's own gun from him and killing him with it. This being the same gun he shot you with at the start of the game, obviously. If you want to truly make it a karmic death, do this while he's tied up and on his knees in Caesar's tent, just like you were when he shot you. There's even a mod that allows the player to craft a bullet with Benny's name on it out of the remains of the bullet he fired at the beginning of the game.
    • In the add-on Dead Money, the insane former elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, Elijah, kills dozens of people, brutally tortures Christine, enslaves the mentally handicapped aspect of a schizophrenic Super Mutant, and forces you to fight your way through dozens of Ghost People to penetrate the Sierra Madre Casino under the threat of death, all so he can access the treasures inside the casino's vault. In the final confrontation with him, an option for dealing with him is to just let him have the treasure while you waltz away. He'll walk into the vault and trigger a trap, locking himself inside forever.
    • Alice McLafferty and the Van Graffs receive this in the ending if you give the Gun Runner manufacturing specs to the former and expose both to the NCR during Cass's companion quest. The player can also deliver this to the latter group by killing them with their own energy weapons.
    • Early in the game, you might pick up a "Sunset Sarsaparilla Star Bottle Cap" that is not added to your total. After a while, an NPC will approach you to tell you that these caps are special in that collecting enough of them supposedly leads to a valuable treasure. He then warns you that the promise of treasure is enough to make some people kill others just on suspicion that they have Star Caps, namedropping one Allen Marks as a particularly notorious offender. If you actually get enough of these caps yourself... you'll find that the treasure itself is absolutely worthless. Your real "prize" for completing this sidequest is a unique Laser Pistol... found on Allen Marks's corpse, who after reaching the "treasure" managed to accidentally lock himself inside the airtight room and suffocate to death, leaving behind an audio recording of his final moments in which he basically admits that he deserved what he got and mentions how his mother always told him that people who murder and steal "die bad in the end".
• In Final Fantasy VI, Emperor Gestahl meets his demise at the hands of his Court Mage scapegoat, falling from the floating continent he has long sought to resurrect.
• Final Fantasy XVI: Ultima intentionally created The Chosen One, sacrificing his Eikons and mothercrystals in the process, so he would have an overpowered superhuman to possess. Said Chosen One punches him to death.
• The ultimate fate of William Afton in Five Nights at Freddy's 3. Cornered by the spirits of the five children he murdered and stuffed into the animatronic suits, he hides inside the Springtrap suit and laughs when he thinks he's safe... except he forgot to fully crank the endoskeleton inside all the way, resulting in him getting crushed and maimed, very much the same way he did to the children. For bonus points, he quickens and makes his own death all the more agonizing by trying to get the suit off in a panic, resulting in him slumping against a wall and twitching to death. For extra bonus points, the Cassette Man/Henry traps him in Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, causing him to burn, and, in Henry's words, "condemn him to Hell" while setting all the other animatronics' souls free.
• During Full Throttle, the Obviously Evil Corrupt Corporate Executive Ripburger kills old man Corley by beating him to death. At the end of the game, Ripburger is left clinging to a semi on the edge of a cliff after trying to kill the main cast. He falls to death when the license plate he was holding onto snapped off, said license plate bearing the Corley Motors slogan, "You can't beat a Corley."
• In God of War, Ares is killed by the very man he hoped to make into his Ultimate Warrior, Kratos, who was tricked into killing his own wife and daughter, the only two people he ever loved, by Ares.
  Ares: I was trying to make you a great warrior!
  Kratos: You succeeded.
• Common in the Grand Theft Auto series, usually with a crime boss betraying or simply being a Jerkass to an underling, only for said underling to kill them:
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Big Bad Frank Tenpenny crashes his fire truck during a riot in the Grove Street neighborhood. His fellow officers and the Grove Street residents ignore his pleas for help, as he had bullied and harassed both groups for years.
  • Grand Theft Auto V is unique in that the player can permanently kill one of the Villain Protagonists in 2 of 3 endings. Killing Michael results in him being betrayed and murdered by someone he considered a close friend, paralleling his abandonment of Trevor and Brad. Killing Trevor has him burn to death in a puddle of gasoline, which is fitting for a maniac driven by his impulses. The only protagonist you can't kill is Franklin, who's doing the betraying. Ending C in turn has the three protagonists doling these out to every significant villain in the game instead; best example goes to Devin Weston, who gets locked up in a trunk, thoroughly insulted throughout his pathetic attempts at paying his killers off, tied up, and finally killed when the car he's locked up in is pushed off a cliff and explodes.
• Grim Fandango:
  • Amoral Attorney Nick Virago is seen riding the Number Nine with a fake ticket. However, the gate knows that the tickets are not real, so Nick and everyone on that train who tried to buy their way into the Ninth Underworld get Dragged Off to Hell.
  • Hector LeMans keeps a water supply to maintain the flowers that grow on his sprouted victims. Manny fills the tank with Sproutella and turns on the sprinklers, which kills Hector inside his own greenhouse, inflicting on Hector the fate he had inflicted on so many others.
• The Prophet of Truth's demise in Halo 3 is incredibly karmic and well-deserved after all that he had done. For starters, the last remaining Hierarch of an empire devoted to bringing about the extinction of humankind is Forced to Watch the Demon - aka Master Chief, a human - undo his efforts to achieve godhood by aborting the activation of the Halo array. A few seconds later, he dies by way of being stabbed through the back by the Arbiter, who Truth himself stabbed in the back during Halo 2 (along with the Arbiter's entire race by ordering their genocide). Also, after abandoning High Charity using the Forerunner ship that powered it, which sped up the fall of the city and its inhabitants to the Flood, Truth himself falls victim to the parasite, except the Gravemind takes his time infecting Truth, just to prolong his suffering.
• Heavy Rain: The origami killer in one scenario can meet his ultimate fate by drowning in rainwater. In another he is shot by the mother of one of his victims that he himself saved.
• Hungry Lamu: Doctor Bronze was killed by his own son, who he turned into a monster.
• Each of the eponymous Killer7 were killed by Emir Parkreiner in manners that are reflected in their ingame abilities that would have saved them then. Including Garcian himself.
  • Kevin was disguised as a hotel bellboy, but his disguise was seen through easily by Parkreiner and he was killed instantly. In death, he gains invisibility and is mute.
  • MASK de Smith is seen as an invincible superhero with his mask on and is the strongest of the group. He was killed when Parkreiner caught him off guard with his mask off.
  • Con had his headphones on, music up full blast, so he couldn't hear Emir coming and was too slow to react. When playable, his hearing is very much on point and he's the fastest of the group.
  • Coyote can jump real high and use unorthodox routes to find objectives and the like. In life, he was outwitted by Parkreiner and wasn't agile enough to use more creative escape routes, lacking the agility and ingenuity he has now.
  • Rather than warn her comrades, KAEDE ran and hid behind barriers in a failed attempt to fend off Parkreiner. Now she can dispel barriers and willingly bears the mark of a coward as penance.
  • Dan actually did draw on equal ground with Parkreiner but ran his mouth too much without backing it up, allowing Emir to kill him easily. When playable, his draw speed is one of the fastest in the game, he now uses a hugeass revolver and thus while he still has an ego, he can now properly back it up.
  • Finally, Emir/Garcian himself, overcome with guilt for killing them all, committed suicide. In death, he can revive the other personae.
  • In an unrelated example, Curtis Blackburn, an unrepentant rapist, kidnapper, and organ harvester, gets mutilated by his own organ-harvesting machine after resident badass Dan refuses to let him have a peaceful, stylish death.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep: Lady Tremaine and her daughters suffer this fate. Their hatred, envy, and wrath summons an Unversed, the Cursed Coach, in an attempt to kill Cinderella, but are burned alive by one of its bombs, leading to their deaths and Hell, whether immiently or as Heartless at the hands of Sora later on. Doubles as Hoist by His Own Petard.
• In Lamplight City, the true culprit of the first case, Guy Dumas, confesses that he attempted to invoke this when he tried to have Madam DuPrée Buried Alive. DuPrée was a violent racist who would often torture her black servants for imagined slights, and one of her preferred methods of torture to lock them into a small, coffin-sized room with out food or water for days. As such, Dumas felt it was only a fitting end for her to die that way.
• The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks has Chancellor Cole who separated Zelda's spirit from her body with the goal to revive his king, and he did it, but at the price of his own body.
• Like a Dragon:
  • Kiminobu Hiyoshi, the doctor directly responsible for Nishikiyama's Start of Darkness in Yakuza Kiwami by getting him to round up 30 million yen to get his sister a heart transplant from the Black Market, only to instead use the money to settle his gambling debts and skip town, ends up getting what's coming to him in Ryu ga Gotoku Online — Nishikiyama sells him to black market organ harvesters. For extra karmic justice, Hiyoshi's organs turn out to be worth 30 million yen, the exact amount he had requested Nishikiyama get for him.
  • In Ishin!, Matsubara Chuji kills the informant known as The Crow when it becomes apparent that Ryoma had worked with him before he joined the Shinsengumi, because he doesn't want Ryoma going back to him to dig up any secrets on Chuji. At the end of the chapter where this happens, Chuji is himself exposed as an informant for Choshu and is Killed Mid-Sentence before he can reveal Ryoma's identity.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect 2's Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC, you can look up classified dossiers on your squadmates. Garrus' reveals that during his days as a vigilante on Omega, he was especially fond of delivering karmic deaths to his victims when he wasn't shooting them in the head:
    • Har Urek, volus saboteur: sabotaged his environmental suit.
    • Gus Williams, human weapon smuggler: headshot with a smuggled weapon.
    • Thralog Mirki'it, batarian red sand dealer: overdose of red sand.
    • Zel'Aenik nar Helash, quarian viral serial killer: cough.
  • Mass Effect 3:
    • After spending the series stabbing people in the gut with his signature shirasaya blade, at least one of whom was Shepard's friend/love interest, after being beaten and broken by Shepard, Kai Leng attempts to stab them in the back while they're perusing the Illusive Man's files. Shepard realizes at the last second what is happening and dodges his stab or, if the Renegade interrupt is taken, shatters his sword for bonus points and proceeds to gut Kai Leng like a fish with the omniblade.
      Shepard: That was for Thane/Miranda/Kirrahe, you son of a bitch!
    • If Miranda is still alive, then she is the one who kills her father, Henry Lawson. The very man who had created her to be nothing more than a tool and his property and controlled every aspect of her life before she escaped. And he's killed in the very facility where he oversaw the murder and experimentation of thousands to millions of families seeking refuge from the war.
• In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the Big Bad of the story, Colonel Yevgeny Borisovich Volgin, ultimately suffers this fate. For perspective, the man carries 10 million volts of electricity in his body and thus utters the phrase, "Kuwabara", which is based off of a legend that says it can ward off lightning during rainstorms, out of a paranoia that his electric gift might make him a lightning rod if it rains. As a villain, he is a cruel man that tortures people for fun and is implied to rape men and women alike, but despite having petty evil as a hobby, he is still a formidable foe. During the climatic confrontation with Volgin, Snake defeats him once with CQC, leaving him to die in his exploding base, but he survives the explosion and begins a prolonged chase piloting the Shagohod, where he is lured onto a bridge rigged with explosives and falls into the river below, drives the Shagohod up the collapsed bridge to continue the fight, and is shot like a billion times with rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire until he finally collapses. Volgin, being ever persistent, refuses to give up and screams at Snake in frustration, but his efforts to restart the battle are cut short when a rain storm begins... Throwing off his usual paranoia, Volgin refuses to chant his usual "Kuwabara" and states arrogantly, "Who is afraid of a little thunder?" Ironically, moments later, a lightning bolt strikes him, setting his body on fire and igniting the bullets strapped to his chest, which go off and turn his body to Swiss cheese. Naked Snake, seeing this, remarks, "Fried by a bolt of lightning... A fitting end."
• Mortal Kombat 9: At near the end of the game, Raiden uses the Elder Gods to defeat Shao Kahn and destroys him as punishment for breaking the rules of Mortal Kombat before returning to the heavens.
• In Mortal Kombat X, Scorpion finally learns that his benefactor from the Netherrealm, Quan Chi, manipulated the Lin Kuei into exterminating the Shirai Ryu and killing his wife and son. After making amends with his former nemesis Sub-Zero, he immediately hunts down and beheads Quan Chi.
• In Murder House: The Easter Ripper manages to shrug off the protagonist shooting him multiple times with a handgun and shotgun, but then his victims — who he alternately starved and fed booby-trapped food — suddenly rise as zombies and eat him alive.
• New Legends have the final fate of Xao Gon, the game's main villain. He's the warlord who wiped out the Soo Kingdom, killed her wise Emperor, enslaved her people and have the noble Prince Sun-Soo Made a Slave and trying to use a Kill Sat to wipe out every kingdom who dares to oppose him — his comeuppance involves getting defeated by the prince in a lengthy boss battle, and his Kill Sat sabotaged by the prince's allies, where the first and only shot fired by said weapon ends up vaporizing Xao Gon.
• Nintendo Wars:
  • A sweet one comes to the Obstructive Bureaucrat in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. The mayor of a group of civilian refugees has been unimaginably unhelpful at every turn, acting horrendously ungrateful to the protagonists every time they save his life and actively hampering their efforts, even though he comes whining to them whenever he's in trouble. In the latter part of the game, he attempts to sell out the heroes to the Big Bad to get a vaccine against a looming disease; he's told that there's only one vial and he can either use it on himself or wait for more to be produced from it to help his community. Thinking only of himself, he grabs it and injects it into himself. It was poison; the Big Bad just wanted to see if the guy would really sell out his community.
  • Greyfield/Sigismundo gets one as well. He attempts to surrender to Lin to avoid being killed. Lin shoots him anyway. This is karmic on 2 counts, 1: The player is fighting Greyfield because he himself executed prisoners, and 2: He attempts to say Lin's former CO wouldn't kill a prisoner; too bad for him Lin is not Brenner, and the only reason he is dealing with Lin instead of him is because he killed Brenner.
• Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners: If you choose to let him die, Soji Mizumi is strangled to death by a sand monster after attempting to force himself on her.
• Rave Heart: Robert Jancarlo sold Klein into sex slavery at Kor's Facility. Later, Jancarlo is kidnapped by the Galactic Enforcers, who take him to that very same facility and mutate him into a mindless monster.
• Red Dead Redemption
  • Throughout the game, government agent Edgar Ross plagues John Marston by holding his family captive and threatening them with harm unless Marston, who had tried to go straight, hunts down and kills his old friends in Dutch van der Linde's gang. After Marston finishes dismantling his old gang, Ross appears to make good on his end of the deal and allows Marston to reunite with his wife and son, only to later try and kill them all since Marston was now a loose thread in his otherwise sterling career. Marston's wife and son manage to escape while Marston himself is gunned down. Several years later, Marston's son, Jack, hunts Ross down. ^note He has the option of gunning down Ross's family, too, but this is less Laser-Guided Karma and more He Who Fights Monsters, as Ross's family is innocent.
  • In the Undead Nightmare expansion, a cutscene involves John Marston listening with obvious distaste to the racist, sexist, bigotted ranting of Herbert Moon. Then Herbert goes outside and meets three zombies, while in the background Marston calmly smoke a cigarette and watches. When the cutscene ends, the player then gets to pop zombie-Moon in the head to put him out of humanity's misery.
• Early on in Red Dead Redemption 2, Arthur Morgan has a major (mandatory, unlike if the player chooses to play him with low honor) Kick the Dog moment while he works as a thug for Strauss's loan shark business. He's sent to collect money from a family that can't pay because the husband is ill... and after a minor provocation, Arthur beats the poor man half to death and later taunts the family with it on a return trip for debt collection. Turns out, the man had tuberculosis and passed it on to Arthur while he was getting beaten up. Tuberculosis is treatable today via use of antibiotics... which were approximately half a century away from being invented in 1899 (why it was the original Incurable Cough of Death), so for Arthur it's a death sentence, made worse by his outlaw lifestyle making him extremely vulnerable and preventing him from doing the few things that could extend his life expectancy. Sure enough, in the High Honor ending, he does indeed die of tuberculosis, while in the Low Honor ending, Micah Bell finishes the job in a fight he most certainly wouldn't have won (and indeed, he doesn't if Arthur's honor is high) if Arthur didn't already have one foot in the grave.
• RefleX has ZODIAC Virgo murdering the Phoenix and its pilot with a Wave-Motion Gun and a grotesque display of Bullet Hell. The Phoenix then re-awakens as the ZODIAC Ophiuchus and gives Virgo a taste of its own medicine, using an infinite-use Attack Reflector to destroy Virgo with its own shots.
• Resident Evil:
  • Albert Wesker betrays his entire STARS team in Resident Evil, intending to get them all killed and abscond with the Tyrant Super-Soldier prototype. He succeeds in waking up the Tyrant, but is promptly impaled by it and hurled across the room. (However, Wesker actually survives this.)
  • In Resident Evil 0, James Marcus dies the same way he condemned so many of the people he experimented on.
  • Resident Evil 2:
    • William Birkin, who participated in having his mentor James Marcus gunned down in his own laboratory so his research could be stolen, is ten years later gunned down in his own laboratory so his research can be stolen. They also both refuse to go down quietly...
    • Brian Irons, a Dirty Cop who took bribes to allow William Birkin's experiments (in the Remake, this includes children) is killed by a mutated Birkin. The fact that he dies from having an embryo implanted into his mouth that bursts out of his body fits well, as Irons is also an implied rapist.
  • Resident Evil 5:
    • Corrupt Corporate Executive and Evilutionary Biologist, Excella Gione is exposed by Albert Wesker to the very virus she had planned to spread across the world. No more genetically compatible than her own experimental test subjects, Excella erupts into a hideous morass of mindless maggot-like creatures.
    • After coming back from the dead, Wesker's final death has him blasted to pieces by his archenemy Chris (who was also part of the team he betrayed in RE1) after being infected with his own Uroboros super-virus.
• Return Of The Obra Dinn: Edward Nichols is directly responsible for the series of events that kills almost everyone aboard the Obra Dinn through his greed, cowardice, and malice. After attempting to leave the ship with the Formosans's chest, he tries to talk his way back on when the Obra Dinn catches up to his lifeboat. At that point, the last surviving Formosan aboard, Chioh Tan, shoots Nichols clean through the heart, taking vengeance for the other Formosans and ensuring Nichols doesn't escape the bloodbath he brought down upon the ship.
• In Saints Row: The Third's "Gangstas in Space" DLC, The Boss is starring in an over-the-top sci-fi film with a Jerkass director and a beleaguered co-star that he keeps berating for breaking character and not following his insane commands. Come the third act, he convinces the military to attack the two of them in an effort to make the movie look more realistic, and The Boss's co-star, who by now has grown a spine and is tired of putting up with the director trying to kill them, being mean to her, and having a bad scarf, runs his ass down with the modified VTOL that the duo pilot.
• Saints Row IV: after Zinyak destroys the Earth, the Boss promises to rip their head off. After defeating Zinyak in the final boss battle, they make good on their promise.
• If you aren’t impeached first in Shadow President, then it is 100% possible for you to end up assassinated if you start committing atrocities, like carpet-bombing a small country (often with no nuclear capabilities of their own) into oblivion.
• In Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, the chauvinistic, so-called "smartest man on the seven seas" pirate Captain LeFwee is outsmarted and killed by Penelope, who knocks him off the ship into the ocean where he is then eaten by sharks, with only his hat remaining. Notably, he's the only non-main villain in the Sly series who is killed rather than arrested at the end of his chapter.
• Spec Ops: The Line: At the start of chapter 11, you find out that Agent Riggs's plan to steal water is meant to deprive Dubai of it, condemning all of those in it to a slow and agonizing death so no one can tell of the 33rd's atrocities, which in his head would lead to a war between the US and the Middle East. He's pinned under a truck, with fire creeping up to his legs. You can finish him as he asks you to, or you can leave him to be slowly and agonizingly burned alive.
• In StarCraft, Arcturus Mengsk's Moral Event Horizon was to unleash the Zerg Swarm on the Confederate homeworld and abandon his right-hand Sarah Kerrigan on the planet to die by their claws. Come Heart of the Swarm, Kerrigan, having now become the Zerg's Hive Queen and an insanely powerful Humanoid Abomination, unleashes the Swarm on his planet, makes her way to his palace, and kills him personally in a rather spectacular way.
• In Startopia, the mind-blowingly rich and lazy Gem Slugs have their own private, personalized bar and bathhouse; the contents are so horrendously vile to non-Gem Slugs that the stench can fill half a space station. They only reason they exist is because the bars make them very happy, and Very Happy Gem Slugs make Solid Gold Poop. Every once in a while, a Gem Slug will become so enamored with how much richer and superior they look to the other races when in these baths that they'll forget to take care of their health, eventually dying/drowning. The developers caught it early... but didn't really feel like fixing it because of this trope.
• Every Star Trek fan who has sat through the Dominion War arc of Deep Space 9 will be familiar with the Female Founder who leads the Dominion and is the driving force behind causing it. So seeing her return in Star Trek Online heralds a lot of tension. It gets even worse when it is discovered, during the "Victory is Life" expansion, that she is the creator of the Jem'Hadar, the Fek'Ihri (the Klingon Demons), and was the primary individual responsible for driving the Hur'q insane and turning them against her enemies, all in the process of creating ketracel-white to enslave the Jem'Hadar. Her sins are so black, she was willing to kill other Founders, which is a huge no-no among the changelings, and eventually tried to kill the player, Odo, Garak, and Bashir to keep her secret when they discovered all her dirty laundry on Havas-Kul, the Hur'q homeworld. So, needless to say, it is some karmic catharisis that anyone feels when she meets a rather violent end to a super Hur'q which impales her and blasting her with sonic energy into a puddle of goop.
• In Terranigma, the heroes comment on the karmic irony of Beruga getting accidentally killed by one of his own machines.
• Uncharted:
  • At the end of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Atoq Navarro is dragged to the bottom of the sea along with the treasure he worked so ruthlessly to acquire.
  • Lazarevic of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves lives by a creed of "No Compassion, No Mercy". He seeks the city of Shambala to get access to the sap of the Tree of Life, which makes him immortal and super-strong. After being defeated, he mocks Nathan for not having the guts to finish him off. Nathan dismisses him and points out that he might not be willing to do it, but they are. "They" being the mob of merciless, compassionless Guardians (the inhabitants of Shambala, many of whom were killed by Lazarevic) that immediately tear Lazarevic apart.
  • Uncharted 4: A Thief's End has two examples:
    • In the backstory, the pirate captains who founded Libertalia did so in order to swindle the colonists out of their treasure. They then turned on each other, which led to Avery and Thomas Tew poisoning the rest of the captains to keep the treasure for themselves. Finally, Avery and Tew fought each other in an attempt to monopolise the treasure, resulting in a Mutual Kill.
    • Rafe spends the game obsessed with Avery's treasure. He eventually makes it to the treasure room, which has been set on fire by traps, and is locked inside (along with Nathan and Sam, the latter of whom is pinned under a beam). Nathan proposes an Enemy Mine, requesting Rafe's help to rescue Sam so they can all escape, but Rafe refuses and challenges him to a sword fight (using the same swords as Avery and Tew, no less). Rafe gets the upper hand and disarms Nathan, but Sam recovers his consciousness and slides the sword back to Nathan, allowing him to cut a rope holding up a bag of treasure. Thus, Rafe is crushed underneath the very treasure he was after.
• Combined with Book Ends in Undertale, it's possible for this to happen to you on a Genocide Run if you lull the Wake-Up Call Boss Papyrus into sparing you and giving you a hug and then kill him when his guard's down. Sans will turn up as the Final Boss and offer you mercy and a hug: if you accept, he hits you with an unavoidable One-Hit Kill, and the Game Over screen's sad music will be replaced by a ridiculous sped-up version of Dogsong, and Sans will be there to mock you.
  Sans: geeettttttt dunked on!!!
  • A case of karmic suicide: in the backstory, The First Fallen Child killed themself with buttercups, with which they earlier poisoned their adoptive father Asgore. It should be noted, though, that this particular method of suicide was chosen for a different reason than just karmic irony: in order for their plan to work, everyone had to believe they succumbed to a disease. When Asgore was poisoned, everyone mistook the symptoms for a serious illness and The Fallen hoped that it would happen again.
• Valkyria Chronicles delivers satisfying ends to the morally corrupt characters of the story. Even Squad 7 is subject to it. The closer a character is to the moral high ground, the better their epilogue is.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
  • The entire game has your Player Character running around Los Angeles searching for a Sarcophagus that supposedly contains an ancient and unbelievably powerful vampire. This is done on the orders of Prince LaCroix, who desires to diablerize the slumbering Ancient and effectively nick all its awesome, god-like powers. This comes back to bite him in all the game's endings: Either two of the factions he's back-stabbed get annoyed enough that they (with the help of the very same Player Character) put him down, or he actually gets the Sarcophagus and it turns out what he had lied, cheated, back-stabbed, and manipulated to get does not contain an Ancient vampire, but half a ton of C4. Your imagination can probably draw an accurate picture of what happens next.
  • This can also happen to the Player Character themselves in many endings you can get. You can suffer one if you either ally with the Prince regardless of how he's wronged you,^note He spends the last hour of the game framing you for a popular vampire's death, sending mercs after you, and the entire game before then sending you on Suicide Missions because he was forced to spare you for political reasons. if you are power-mad enough to open the Sarcophagus yourself, or ally with the Kindred-hating Kuei-jin. In the former two, you go up in flames with the Prince; in the latter ending, their leader decides you're too much of a danger to keep around, and throws the sarcophagus into the ocean with you chained to it.
• In The Walking Dead, Larry, Brenda, and Andrew from Episode 2. In Episode 1, Larry tried to have Kenny's son thrown out to the zombies, or have his skull crushed, as there was a small chance he would turn into a zombie. In Episode 2, Larry gets a heart attack while locked in a room with Kenny, who crushes his head to stop him reanimating. Brenda of the St John Dairy cuts off Mark's legs for food, and leaves him upstairs to bleed to death. Being unaware that all people with intact brain stems turn into zombies upon death, when she has Katjaa at gunpoint in front of Lee, she backs upstairs and is grabbed and bitten by zombie Mark. In a later blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, Brenda is seen as a zombie, shambling out of the front door of the house. Also, you have the option to kick Andrew into the electric fence that kept the St. John Dairy safe from zombies.
• In the finale of The Witcher, the main villain Jacques De Aldersberg knocks Geralt's steel sword, which is better suited for killing humans, out of Geralt's hands. Geralt simply proceeds to take out his silver sword, which is better suited for killing monsters, and runs Jacques through with it. Although Jacques De Aldersberg is shocked that Geralt would use his monster-slaying sword to kill him, it's pretty obvious that Jacques De Aldersberg is just as bad as, if not worse than, the mindless monsters that Geralt usually slays.
• Wolfenstein:
  • Wolfenstein: The New Order: early in the game, Deathshead forces BJ to make a Sadistic Choice, whether to condemn his friend Fergus Reid or a fresh-faced young man, Probst Wyatt, to be the victim of Deathshead's experimentation. Whoever BJ chooses has their eyes cut out and their brain subsequently sucked out and used decades later in a Nazi robot. In the end, BJ manages to land a killing blow on him. Deathshead tries to kill BJ with a grenade in his hand, but it fails to take out BJ.
  • Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: Frau Engel haunts BJ throughout the game, killing his friend Caroline, capturing him, stealing the engagement ring that belonged to his mother (who died in the Nazis' concentration camps), and decapitates him. Thankfully, BJ gets better and manages to get the better of her, burying a hatchet in her skull and splitting it open like a watermelon. Engel's death on live national television also helps to spark the second American Revolution, driving the Nazis out of the country and seriously damaging the regime Engel was so fanatically devoted to.
  • Also from The New Colossus, Rip Blazkowics, BJ's abusive father, who brutally punished him for having the audacity to be nice to non-whites by forcing him to shoot his own pet dog. When BJ returns to his old house many years after running away to join the army and escape his abuse, he is confronted by Rip once more, who reveals that after the Nazis conquered America, he immediately started selling out his neighbors to improve his station in life. Among his victims was his own wife, Zofia, a Jewish immigrant from Poland. BJ immediately hacks off Rip's arm and stabs him in the heart.
• In the third week of The World Ends with You, Konishi spends most of her time finding new and inventive ways to torment Beat and Rhyme, including turning the latter into a pin. In the final phase of her boss fight, Neku steals that pin, and it's his only source of damage — making it effectively a Beat-Rhyme team-up to finish Konishi off.
• One World of Warcraft quest chain has you infiltrating the Dark Horde in a Paper-Thin Disguise. One of the quests has you assassinate three of their key figures, one of whom is a worg handler that you can see demoralizing the worgs. When you stab her with one of the scorpid barbs you were handed upon accepting the quest, she becomes paralyzed for long enough for the worgs to rebel and tear her to shreds.
  • In the updated Scarlet Halls instance (an amalgamation of the Library and Armory instances), the Scarlet Crusade members who are patrolling the first third of the dungeon are accompanied by starving and presumably mistreated hounds; throwing a food bucket at them causes the dogs to eat them alive and go to sleep, enabling you to pass without incident. The first boss, Houndsmaster Braun, becomes frustrated with his dogs midway through the fight and threatens to put them down once he finishes off the party. After the party defeats him, the dogs eat him alive and then tear through an otherwise impenetrable phalanx of Scarlet Crusaders.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, Mumkhar's death is extremely karmic when you get right down to it. First, you have the final boss fight with Metal Face. Afterward, Shulk gets a vision of Mumkhar's impending doom, and tries to warn him. Mumkhar completely ignores the warning and fires a ranged attack, which ultimately leads to him being Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, and all of this happens while he is piloting a Humongous Mecha. He basically died in the exact same way that he almost killed Fiora!

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