AestheticGamer1Horror games are all about playing as characters that go through terrible experiences and situations that are seriously against their favor, but who has it the worst? Out of all the countless deaths, injuries, dark pasts, unimaginable forces of evil, sacrifices, and experiences these heroes have to go through, who to honest goodness can hold a spot for having a shitty life in such a crazy world as the ones they have to live in? We’re here to answer this question.
This article will contain spoilers for the individual characters and games they come from, so if you see a character and you don’t want to know his or her story, don’t read why we think their lives are particularly shitty. For the sake of diversity, we’re also making it where only one character can represent a franchise, and why we believe they are the one with the shittiest life to represent it. The character must of been playable in the series at some point, we’re not focusing on the side characters or the villains here but the heroes we play as. With all that out of the way, let’s begin counting down the unlucky horror heroes.
10. Daniel (Amnesia: The Dark Descent)
Daniel is the main character of Amnesia, who as such is experiencing amnesia. Maybe for the best, as the little we know about him is that his sister Hazel had an illness growing up, his dad beat him, he was bullied in school, and becames an archaeologist where he came in possession of an orb which caused a shadow to follow him and kill all those that came close to him. Seeking help, he turns to a man named Alexander, who tells him the only way to rid himself of the Shadow is to use the life energy extracted from tortured prisoners. Daniel accepts, convinces himself the prisoners are worthless and deserved to die, but ultimately Alexander abandons him. Feeling remorse and deciding he’d rather forget what he had done in seek of redemption, he drinks an Amnesia mixture and forgets everything that had happened to him. We start the game after he drinks it, and then have to run through this twisted castle dealing with insanity and monsters that hunt him down. While it’s kind of hard to sympathize with a murderer, Daniel went through a life full of loss and abuse and, upon forgetting about all of that, hides in the darkness as he slowly goes crazy all the while being hunted by a force he cannot beat. However, upon all of his hardships he does find his own personal redemption, gets revenge on the man that betrayed him, and is able to escape the Shadow. So he has a happy ending of sorts and is able to leave the castle scotch free.
While he had some terrible experiences for certain, they say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. He did do some terrible things himself for no other reason but to help himself. With that, he forgot everything that happened to him so it’s not like he can recall all of his experiences of his life anyway, which for him might be a blessing. He had a terrible life compared to many heroes for sure, but he can’t quite compare to what happened to the rest of the characters on this list.
9. Aya Brea (Parasite Eve)
Aya Brea was 5-years old when the first terrible incident of her life happened; her mother (Mariko) and sister (Maya) both died in a car accident. Maya’s organs were preserved, which lead to one of her corneas to be transplanted into Aya when she was 14. It seems that Maya had some specially devious mitochondria in her though, as they get to work to modifying Aya’s genetic structure and give her special abilities in the process. As an adult, she becomes a detective, and at the age of 25 she goes on a date with some guy to an Opera. At this opera, a strange women comes to sing which causes everyone it the auditorium to randomly explode (including her date) except for Aya and the opera singer. Aya then has to go through fighting a lot of shit and learning she has the special ability to not spontaneously explode from a demon baby that’s soon going to be birthed that will end the world and mere kicks in her mom’s tummy cause deaths.
Besides experiencing loss and tragedy at a young age and being pushed to be a hero which causes inner turmoil and hardships all thanks to her unwillingly gaining these special powers, she has to deal with complicated conspiracies, used as a human weapon and for cloning, and she is killed and her body and soul are morphed to create a monster race named the Twisted. While she had the plus to have superhuman abilities, it came with the price of responsibility she did not want and was pushed to use with the sake of humanity on her hands. She also had to deal with having her clothes constantly being torn off in her latest installment, which is a different kind of shit-dealing in itself. Aya gets her shitty life reward for experiencing several tragedies and losses at a young and impressionable age, ultimately being used as a weapon and a source of fanservice, only to die and spawn a race of terrible monsters from her body that do the very thing she was trying to stop. That’s a pretty shitty way to live and die, if you ask us.
8. The Boy from Limbo (Limbo)
Unnamed, unarmed, defenseless, harmless, yet put through so much turmoil and at such a young age too. The boy from Limbo has to deal with a lot of misfortunes in his fight for survival; giant spiders try to eat him, strange children try to murder him, glowing worms attach to his head and control him, among other hardships he must face. He didn’t do anything to deserve this punishment, he has no experience being so young, and he has to face all of this absolutely alone in this monochrome world. Why is he going through all of this? He’s looking for his sister. That’s ALL he wants, something so earnest and pure then tainted by the darkness that wants to tear him apart and the traps that will crush and rip him to shreds. If that isn’t unlucky and shitty, we don’t know what is. Luckily he ultimately does find her… And that’s all he really accomplished as the game abruptly ends at that point. At least he finished what he started, even when putting up with all of that shit. What a grand overachiever.
7. Fuminori Sakisaka (Saya No Uta)
Fuminori gets into a tragic car accident that kills his parents and leaves him on the brink of dying with serious injuries to the point he has to go under an experimental brain surgery procedure to save his life. It saves him, but he awakens to a world that is full of gore, carnage, and organs littering everything, strange flesh-blob monsters that stink terribly roaming the world in place of humans, a pitch black sky, and the things he once enjoyed to smell and eat now are absolutely terrible to him. However, he meets a beautiful girl and falls in love… Except it turns out that his senses are all twisted for the rest of his life and everything he perceives as twisted is actually normal, and the girl he perceives as beautiful is actually a twisted monster from another dimension that the mere sight of will drive a person insane. She also turns him into a cannibal and he eats his best friend’s girlfriend, among other people.
The game has three endings. In the first, he gets turned back to normal but is locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life and never see’s the girl he fell in love with ever again. In the second, he is killed along with the girl he loves and everyone he ever cared about. The final ending, his love sacrificing herself to turn all of humanity into monsters and sends the world into doomsday, so that the world will become beautiful for him (because it’s actually twisted he perceives it as beautiful). There’s no real good ending to the game, he turns into a messed up freak and has to live his time in a nightmare, he loses most of the people he cares about, and becomes a cannibal that can no longer enjoy what he used to enjoy. Why isn’t this higher on the list? Well he did find love and they get naked and have sex plenty of times (to the point he has an orgy with his best female friend and his love interest), and ends up enjoying himself most of the adventure (before he learns what his situation actually is), and except in one ending he lives anyway and the world becomes beautiful to him… So while he is living a nightmare, he is able to find the beauty in his own fucked up way and have a good time in his ignorance. Still, he is rather unlucky for everything he does have to go through. Ignorance is bliss.
6. Leon S. Kennedy (Resident Evil)
Leon had a fairly normal bringing up, and upon graduating got a job as a police officer in Raccoon City. It was also his first day on the force that his life got turned upside down and he was forced to deal with endless zombies, twisted biological weapons, monsters that could not be killed, and heartbreak all in a single night while rushing the clock to save others and himself from an incoming nuclear missile. Hell, he even missed his own party. No sooner from getting out of that hell hole, he immediately crawls into another and is forced to become a special agent for the government at the sake of protecting a young girl (who he had previously protected from a monster dad that wanted to rape her). He goes on countless adventures, each one testing his limits more than the last. He experiences more losses, more hardships, and is betrayed by the woman he once loved who came back from the dead after years of missing. Whenever in South America, Spain, an Airport, or the streets of London, he keeps on pushing through these trials and is never rewarded for his efforts, just being thrown into the next catastrophe he needs to handle almost single-handily. More so than the rest of the Resident Evil crew, he is never finished with his fight or rewarded for his accomplishments, never allowed to make his own choices but always having to follow circumstance, and arguably even has to deal with the toughest monsters and situations as well. He even needs to protect someone absolutely defenseless in most of his adventures, whenever it being Sherry in RE2, Manuela in Darkside Chronicles, or Ashley in RE4 without any form of partner or assistance (and those he does get almost always die if their not named Claire); we’d like to see Chris Redfield try his hands on any of that. Leon is a man who has to deal with the harshness of circumstance, and bad luck seems to follow him wherever he goes. Yet he does not complain, he keeps moving forward, and rolls with the punches as they come. Admirable, but he’s probably more bad-luck ridden than anyone else in the series.
5. Isaac Clarke (Dead Space)
Isaac Clarke was born on Earth by his parents, Paul and Octavia Clarke. Through his childhood he lived with his mother because his father, who was a ship designer, left before he could get to know him. Isaac’s mom was a strong Unitologist, but Isaac took after his dad and got an education in electrical and mechanical engineering. He was selected for an elite engineering academy for his excellent performance, but unfortunately was not able to attend because his mother used all of his college funds to gain a higher title in the Church of Unitology. Understandably, Isaac was pissed. Still, he worked hard with limited funds at a lesser college and graduated with high honors as a systems engineer. Isaac was part of an emergency response unit for Concordance Extraction Corporation, a mining company. He also met up with Nicole Brennan, a woman he fell in love with and lived with for a while. He encouraged her to go after her dreams as a Medical Officer aboard the USG Ishimura around the same time he started going to assist bigger shipping lines. Later, the USG Ishimura sends a distress signal, and Isaac and his team follow it into a nightmare. An outbreak happens involving Unitology and a thing know as a Marker, which reanimates the dead into horrible monsters. Isaac then is physically and mentally faced with hardships as he tries to find and save his girlfriend and uncover a conspiracy, undertaking each brutal hardship after the other. He finds, however, that his girlfriend committed suicide and one of his fellow employees is a traitor for Unitology. All of his team is killed and he escapes as one of the only survivors, only to fall into a state of temporary insanity induced from the events and the marker and to be diagnosed with dementia, post-traumatic stress disorder and amnesia. The next three years of his life he does not remember, but he awakens in an asylum he was apparently committed to and is awakening during an outbreak of monsters by another Marker he apparently created. He is put through more abuse, has to deal with his guilt and visions of his dead girlfriend, and even has to deal with bodily harm such as a needle through the eye and a couple of javelin shots through his body. He meets a girl named Elle, which rescues him when he is about to give in and die, and they escape alive.
Isaac is a trooper and like Leon is a man who works through circumstance with little complaints, but much more guilt and pain. The things he faces are powerful and terrible, they almost overwhelm him time and time again, and he is constantly shoved into situations to help others (and helps others by choice as well) and has been used by others and most people dying around him. He also lost the love of his life, which is something that is not easy for anyone, especially if they feel responsible for it. Isaac’s got life pretty rough and his future doesn’t promise to be any better. He also has a bad habit of things going wrong for him, it seems. Truly he has to deal with a lot of shit and backstabbers.
4. Miku Hinasaki (Fatal Frame)
Fatal Frame has a lot of tragic characters, but Miku has it the worst. She doesn’t have a twin or sibling with her like Mio or Mayu Amakura, she is alone the whole way looking for her brother. Her brother is her only family alive, their father died of natural causes and Miku witnessed the suicide of her mother. Mafuyu goes missing however after an author he is good friends with that disappeared and he went after him. Miku is left alone and goes to the place he disappeared to find him. She has a special sixth sense that allows her to see and face the countless twisted and violent spirits at this strange mansion, armed only with the Camera Obscura, be used and tortured in a ritual, watch the death and sufferings of many, and in the end lose her brother who sacrifices himself to help the Shrine Maiden from the past, Kirie, trapped away with her in the Hell Gate for all eternity. In her loss, she goes to live with Mafuyu’s good friend, Yuu Asou, and his fiancée, Rei Kurosawa. Miku helps as a photography and research assistant until Yuu is killed in a tragic car crash. Under such disaster and despair, they are hit by the Tattooed Curse, and Miku in her dreams enters the Manor of Sleep, a mansion in dreams that tries to capture those caught in it into eternal nightmares. She relives her previous hardships in a nightmarish new way, but believes that here she may be able to meet Mafuyu again. She does briefly, and this time out of regret from her past choice to leave him and escape, is consumed by the Tattooed Curse which will leave her to an eternal sleep full of nightmares. She stays here for some time until released with the other souls by Rei, where she awakens from her sleep. Cast from her nightmares, she says that while she never understood the reason she survived, she realizes why they were allowed to live.
Miku experiences ultimate loss in front of her eyes on multiple occasions, was the subject to torturous rituals, faced nightmarish ghosts, and had to relive all of it again in manifested nightmares. She survives it all, but still holds onto remorse of why she was left to live.
3. Jennifer Simpson (Clock Tower)
Jennifer Simpson is a kind-hearted girl who cares a lot about those close to her, but ends up at a young age in an orphanage after the death of her parents. She has to cope with this while growing up, aided and alongside her three friends at the Orphanage that become like family to her, Laura, Ann and Lotte. And things start look up! A woman named Mary Barrows takes her and her friends in and it looks like they are going to live as a family in a magnificent mansion known as the Clock Tower (named after the magnificent clock tower there). And then all of her hopes and dreams are crushed as it turns out Mary Barrows is a sadistic bitch that kills children with her own demented children, a set of twins named Bobby and Dan, who manages to kill off the other girls along the course of the game (you can save one, but canonically Mary was the only survivor) and send her into a world of fear and agony. To make things worse it turns out this same lady also killed her parents. Everyone around Jennifer dies, including the villains, and it seems like the nightmare it over. Jennifer is put into a mental hospital to recover from her trauma she experiences after these events… Only for everyone around her to start dying again and another Scissorman coming after her in her shocked state. She is then cut up for research and is either hung by a cross and killed or stabbed to death. Did we mention she died at the age of 15? She barely even started living her life and what she did live was plagued by trauma, yet she tried to stay kind and loving to the end. Ultimately she was killed by the same force that killed her parents and her closest friends. That’s a pretty unlucky and a shitty life, if you ask us.
2. Sakuri Kunikai (Demonophobia)
Demonophobia is a free indie horror game, and boy does it feature one of the cases of most tragic hero ever. Sakuri is a high school girl who gets picked on by bullies at school, and as such jokingly performs a ceremony to summon demons to get revenge on them. It doesn’t work and she falls asleep… Only to awaken in Hell herself! Sakuri must now escape hell and it’s eternal suffering, and by eternal suffering we mean she’s going to die. A lot. A LOT. And she remembers and feels the pain every time she dies. This whole game is full of messed up and disturbing deaths, whenever it being her skin melting away in acid, crushed repeatedly, her skin ripped off, raped, a spike going through the bottom of her body out through the top of her head, and many, MANY other ways you can die in this game. And she is just brought back to life in pain and suffering from each one. She also has to face mind games, hellish images, and all forms of abuse as a mere High School student. Oh, and did we mention time passes in Hell and Earth differently, she needs to wait for someone to cast the same spell that she did before she is to be let free, but thanks to the time difference that could take centuries for her. Until then she’s under torment. Her family and friends may be safe and there is hope for her to escape one day, but Sakuri is pretty screwed to damnation merely for performing a ritual. However, even something this terrible is nothing to what our most damned Horror Hero has to face, and that hero is…
1. Heather Mason (Silent Hill)
There are a lot of tragic heroes in the Silent Hill universe, but we determined the one with the worst life was Heather Mason, aka Cheryl Mason, aka Alessa Gillespie. Dahlia Gillespie was her birth mother, back when she was called Alessa Gillespie. She was born with special powers, which got her branded as a witch in elementary school and lead to her being bullied by all of the other children, with all of her previous friends abandoning her and telling her to drop dead. Dahlia, a religious prick, abused her and as reported by her teacher, she came to school almost every day with new bruises or cuts and bore an expression pitifully dark for a 6-year old. She only had one friend she made during this period, a girl named Claudia Wolf who could relate as she came from an abusive family background like Alessa.
Alessa dreamed of a world where there was no hatred, pain, disease, and prayed to the god of the Order she grew up with from Dahlia’s and the Church’s teachings. At 7-years old, Alessa was offered by her mother as a sacrifice to summon their god through birthing. Alessa was set on fire and the ritual was a success, badly burned and immobile, she became pregnant with their god. During this time, Alessa used her powers split her soul in half, giving birth to the other half outside Silent Hill as an infant where Harry Mason and his wife found her, took her in, and name her Cheryl. Alessa, meanwhile, was unable to give birth, but kept the god inside of her. It ate her from the inside and caused her pain worse than death… She however was not allowed to die thanks to the Order, and lived with this nightmare for seven years.
When Cheryl turned three, Harry’s wife and her adopted mother passed away. While Cheryl didn’t understand and was not affected much by the loss, it hit Harry hard as he clanged to Cheryl as his main reason for living. When Cheryl turns 7, she suddenly gets the huge urge to go to Silent Hill, and Harry complies. When they go to the town, they however get into a car crash and Cheryl goes missing. Ultimately the two two halves of her soul, Alessa and Cheryl, combine for the final boss fight and in the ending, Alessa uses her powers to be reborn as a baby which she gives to Harry to live the happy life she never got to experience. Harry at first has reservations and thinks maybe to abandon or even kill the baby, but he decides to take her in and names her Cheryl Mason and comes to love her more than anything in the world.
However, when she is 5-years old they are attacked by a cult member of the Order. Harry kills him, dyes her hair blonde, and renames her Heather as they move away. Heather lives a rather normal life, she is a bit moody and hot-headed, loves to shop, a bit sarcastic, and loves her father. However, she is thrown into a nightmare once again as her friend from her former life as Alessa, Claudia Wolf, sends a detective named Douglas to find her. Claudia resents Harry for keeping god from being birthed and wishes to rebirth the god through Heather, going out of her way to murder Harry in his and Heather’s apartment. Heather is completely distraught and starts turning to Douglas as a replacement father figure. After almost giving birth to the god again, facing many horrors, and killing Claudia, she takes back the name Cheryl with memories of her previous life, and goes out to live her life.
As Alessa she lived a life of nothing but despair, but got hope through both the lives of Cheryl and Heather. Cheryl was lost at the age of seven, and Heather had to deal with the hardships brought over from her her previous life to deal with new ordeals. While given another chance to live a fairly normal life, she dealt with unbelievable suffering and loss. Harry was her savior as Alessa and she reborn herself for his care, but he ultimately was killed as well. Life handed her a bad deck time and time again, and all she that she went through as Alessa was remembered by Heather as new pain was put on the old. However, through the strength and life he provided her, she was able to live on for what is presumably a normal and enjoyable life past her hardships. She had terrible luck, shitty happenings, unbelievable pain, and much loss but was able to take all the shit life dealt out and move forward. She did no wrong, but was wronged many ways. Truly terrible luck and quite the shitty hand dealt for her life, but through it all she still was able to find take 14 years of suffering, and her new life being ruined and still move forward to her future.
Agree or disagree with the list? Leave a comment and share who you think has a shitty life. We had a few very close calls, such as Chuck Greene from Dead Rising 2 or anyone from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, but they were ruled out for one having a bit to much fun killing zombies even his he does have a deathly ill daughter and that all the people in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream were bad people. Who do you think had a particularly shitty life?
