Tear Jerker / Eternal Darkness

• The game makes it clear early on that you shouldn't get too attached to your characters - yet makes that really bloody hard. It seems as though most fans of the game have one character in particular who sticks out to them in some way. Often among the characters who meet horrible fates. Strangely, though, said fates are usually at the time more disturbing/haunting than tearjerking. Their aftermath/closure, on the other hand...
  • The final battle with Pious can make the tears flow. One by one you watch these otherwise fairly normal, decent people destroyed by the machinations of foul things from beyond the veil, and eventually you realize that Pious' plans never specifically targeted these people. To Pious, they were little more than collateral damage, incidental, meaningless deaths that he barely even notices until Alex gets the Tome. Realizing that every single one of them is going to get a chance at Pious' bony necrotic ass is gloriously bittersweet.
  • Anything and everything concerning Anthony is tragic. He spends his entire chapter desperately, painfully struggling through the effects of a zombifying curse to warn Charlemagne of treachery - and is too late, and is subjected to six hundred years isolated, the curse and his failure wearing on, until Paul comes along with his mace.
    • Anthony's low-Sanity voice clips are a bit less panicked and confused than the other characters' and more plain-and-simply desperate, miserable, and in a lot of pain, with at least one that has him start shakily sobbing and begging for help.
  • Paul Luther's death is horrifying and deeply sad - that he had braved his way through the nightmarish scenes under the cathedral - and had kept his faith - only for his life to be taken in a single, futile second.
  • Even Pious might inspire some pity. He had been corrupted so badly by the Ancients. He wasn't in it for the power, he wasn't calling things he couldn't contol, he just heard some weird voices who told him to smash a statue then grab a shiny gem. And for that, he was contorted to produce such evil. And the worst part is that the True Ending reveals that not only he had been intended to be a guardian of the Tome under Mantorok like the other playable characters, but also that he got betrayed by Mantorok himself to start his gambit in getting rid of the other gods. He never had a chance.
• Peter's monologue during his chapter's opening is pretty damn sobering. The music certainly helps, but the real gut punch is that the horror he describes wasn't limited to just the game.
  "I find no solace in the purpose behind of all this senseless violence that surrounds me.Young men die at a rate unheard of in centuries of warfare. Shelling. Machine guns. Mustard gas. Rip, pierce,and burn their flesh. Men soak gauze in their own urine to stop the insidious gas. The hospital cannot cope with the torrent of wounded..."

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