Content warning: This video contains flashing images, most notably at 9:11, 10:04, and 10:49.
From slaying enemies to the trial and error of navigating fatal landscapes, video games ask us to confront death more than any other medium. And with every death, players endure “death effects.” Death effects encompass the aesthetics of a character’s death (including visual and sound effects) and the affect of experiencing death (how, for instance, death is crafted to translate viscerally to players). Death effects are important because they not only articulate aesthetics with mechanics but also reveal the values and cultural formations at play in a game’s treatment of failure, mortality, and rebirth. Despite their critical significance to ludology and narratology, death effects are mostly overlooked in Game Studies. In fact, this video may be the first essay to engage with them at length. In it, I explore death effects across four platforming games: Maddy Makes Games’ Celeste, Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight, and Moon Studios’ Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Each game prompts distinct affects that shape a player’s repeated experience of death. By analyzing these games, I establish death effects as a framework for critical analysis, raising questions about where we might go from here.
is a Métis, Mexican, and Jewish writer and researcher. She graduated from the University of Victoria with a double major in English (Honours) and Writing and is currently enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s Bachelor of Computer Science second-degree program. While her writing attends to the complexities of her identity and heritage, as well as the unraveling and uncovering of family stories, her research is largely focused on death, grief, and affect in video games. Brelyn published her first creative nonfiction piece, “When Spirits Wake,” earlier this year in The Malahat Review's issue #233, and she won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2026 Canadian Games Studies Association Conference for her longer video essay on death effects in the Ori games. She is currently gaining some technical skills in her second degree to bring her more ambitious interactive narratives and video game concepts to life.