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[slembcke]

Wow. The name of that Heart of Darkness game sounded familiar, but I had never seen it. The wikipedia article on it makes it sound more than a bit disturbing for a game that looks like it was aimed at a youngish audience.

[Alistair Aitcheson]

I just love to see particles fly everywhere and hear some rockin' music like in I Wanna be the Guy

[SirNiko]

Three words:

THOU ART DEAD

I liked the newer Prince of Persia games because you could die spectacularly and then rewind time to try again, so as to not be stuck reloading. That's not awesome.

Ragdoll death physics are awesome. N had that down to a science. Get hit and prepare to have limbs fly akimbo and bounce off some corners in a pretty gruesome fashion.

-SirNiko

[Sean A.]

Definitely the first time I played F.E.A.R. Getting pegged to a wall by The Penetrator was awesome but the particle cannon thing that melts your flesh and leaves you nothing but bones. That was crazy.

[Muz]

IVAN has some immensely fun deaths. There's the usual roguelike death of choking on your own vomit... there's stupid deaths like what comes after turning your arm into a banana, and there's the epic death of stepping on a mine and having a chain reaction of wands in your pocket exploding. Exploding wands in IVAN are probably about as deadly as nuclear bombs.

Oh, and there's a little Korean/Japanese game called Demonophobia. If you choose to google it, be warned, there's plenty of loli guro in it, but creepy deaths, including being roasted alive, crushing walls, a sadistic executioner guy, raging demons picking up the character and punching her to death, poisonous death clouds coming from loot, being eaten alive by little bugs, petrification, etc. That game makes the SAW movies look PG13. The really odd thing is that you can find videos of it on youtube. But like any horror game, it's best played alone at midnight.

[Richard Kain]

I am reminded of the point-and-click adventure games of my youth. Some gamers only know the genre from the LucasArts entries. But these were notorious for the fact that you couldn't die. (the puzzles were structured in such a way as to prevent death) Although I enjoyed those games, I was also a big fan of the Sierra-style adventure games. And these featured numerous death sequences.

In Space Quest I, you could get eaten by a sand worm, squished into a ball by an Orat, detonated by a Sarien spider droid, detonated by depresuriation in the vaccuum of space, sliced into little pieces by a laser fence, and you could even have your head melted by either sniffing or drinking from a pool of caustic acid.

Of course, one of my favorite deaths was from Kings Quest VI, when you forgot to bring the tinder box into the minotaur's labyrinth. Classic.

[Kekskiller]

In Stalker: Call of Pripyat I once got killed by a mutant dog as my hero was too overburden and hungry to walk just one meter. It was a ridiculous but pretty awesome combination. Almost like in a roguelike.

I'm sure you can also by hunger only, but that would take some time.

[namre]

Being crushed down in an earthquake, only to find that you're alive and are forced to live in an agonizing pain. You can't kill yourself to relieve you of the pain. So you wait and endure. until you eventually die.

[slembcke]

Uh... Did that happen in some game? That just sounds like an excruciating way to die... not in a game. 

[LemonScented]

I just finished Limbo, and that's pretty much a shopping list of interesting deaths

- Drowning
- Bear trap
- Impaled by a giant spider
- Impaled by spikes
- Crushed
- High fall
- Circular saw
- Electrocution
- Sentry minigun
- Poison dart delivered by a blowpipe

Worms always delivers on the death front, too. Generally pretty standard stuff (i.e. either killed by one of the many weapons in the game, or by falling or drowning), but some of the chain reactions and plain feelings that your worm had been horribly picked on still makes me laugh. The king of death, of course, is Dwarf Fortress. Not so much the individual dwarves (although those deaths can be unexpected and entertaining), but more the chain reactions that cause mass death.

[s0]

I can't believe no one has mentioned Dragon's Lair yet. Here's a death compilation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUZsWwLMk9w

Also Shadowgate. Though none of the deaths are graphically illustrated, they're textually described in often rather cynical/deadpan ways. Also, it's one of the very few games where you can actively commit suicide, by "USE"ing the "SWORD" on your"SELF".