While everybody loves a happy ending, there are some games where you aren’t allowed such a nicety. Some games just want to watch the world burn. These games have endings that have pictures of despair in one way or another.
These are actually my favorite games, because they’re often thoughtful, and they force people to find the slight moments of grace in the otherwise dour endings.
Throughout the history of gaming, a ton of games have often gone down this route, giving us an ending that is either unclear, dark, or overall, hopeless.
Huddle close to your emotional support animals. We’re going to check out the most dark and hopeless games where, no matter what you do, you just can’t win.
Our criteria is going to be games where the endings suggest your efforts were largely in vain or there were some terrible sacrifices that had to be made to get there that may not seem worth it anymore.
Major spoilers for most of the games below.
11 Enderal
It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
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Developer |
SureAI |
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Release Date |
February 14th, 2019 |
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Platforms |
PC |
Enderal is one of the more disturbing journeys I’ve ever had in a game. It’s built on the bones of the Skyrim Creation Engine, but forget about that, because all that whimsy and wonder that Skyrim had is left in the dust here.
Welcome to Enderal, where everything feels slightly off. The music has an off-key disposition, and the citizens seem to be waiting for the end of their lives rather than living them. And for good reason. The Cleansing is coming, and it’s up to you and a group of local leaders to figure out what’s behind it, what it means, and how to stop it.
It’s a typical plot at its core, but in the midst of it is some of the creepiest gameplay I’ve seen. Whether it’s your encounter with the Aged Man, The Black Guardian, or discovering a town that is kept alive in the mind of a mutated child, this is an adventure fit for a straight jacket. The ending gives you one of the biggest Sophie’s choice moments in gaming.
You either decide to stay and sacrifice yourself to stop the cleansing, escape to a city in the sky with one companion in hopes of keeping humanity alive if only just for one more day, or the “best” ending, where you drink an Elixir that lets you and your companion survive even if it’s entirely unclear what actually happened.
It’s a brutal ending that requires you watching your companions slowly be raptured and, yeah, I don’t want to think about this one anymore.
10 Mass Effect 3
Choose Your Color, Commander
Mass Effect 3 is the finale to one of the best sci-fi stories of all time, and you’d think that after hundreds of hours, endless aliens killed and alliances formed, that you’d have a shot at a happy ending, right? This couldn’t all be for nothing, right?
Well, that depends on your point of view, I suppose. After 3 games of fighting to stop the Reaper invasion from essentially erasing life in the universe, you finally make it to the end where you meet the infamous Star Child, who is an entity that basically represents the will of the reapers.
You have 4 choices at this point. Red, Green, Blue, or a 4th option to shoot the Star Child. If you go green, you assimilate all life in the universe together, making organic and synthetic beings one and the same. If you go blue, you become a Reaper yourself, asserting control over what they do from that point forward. If you choose red, you destroy the Reapers and die in the process, but theoretically, end the cycle.
The fourth choice is the most interesting, and it’s basically just shooting Star Child to shut him up and walk away, where he then announces that the cycle will continue.
I guess you could say the synthesis ending could be considered good, but that’s not really the case if you’ve been paying attention to synthetic and organic relations throughout the three games. There is a reason it’s the most hated ending of all time. You can’t win no matter what you do.
9 Final Fantasy 16
An Incomplete Martyr
Final Fantasy 16 is a great time and a return to form for the series in many ways, but it’s the ending that hits the hardest. You can see the writing on the wall for a while on what will have to happen in order to end the game, but still, that doesn’t make the ending any easier to digest.
As Clive, you finally confront Ultima, the alien presence pulling the strings behind closed doors. In order to defeat him for good, you absorb his essence after the final battle, and from that moment on, you know it was going downhill.
As the world is slowly cleansed, Clive is shown on the beach, suffering the disease that all users of the Eikons slowly succumbed to, and it’s assumed that he dies, even if it’s not clearly spelled out.
What makes this so brutal is the unanswered questions. What happened to the Black Mist that Ultima himself was running from? What happened to the Order of the Undying, who are clearly more sinister than they let on? What did we sacrifice ourselves for if the world was doomed anyway?
There is a slight answer to this with a timeskip many years in the future, but it’s impossible to know if this is even the same world at this point, and it’s more of a wink at the audience rather than a true resolution.
8 Elden Ring
Heavy Lies Crown
Elden Ring has a very vague story for the most part, but one thing is clear. You have to become Elden Lord. You don’t really have a choice in the matter, but you do have the choice to do different side quests for different characters to influence the ending you get.
You’re trapped in sort of a Hunger Games-like cycle, where you and others must compete for the Elden Ring to become Elden Lord. However, regardless of what you do or who you decide to help, the fate of the world is murky at best, and that’s for one reason. You see the previous Elden Lords throughout the game and have to fight them all.
They’re all in absolute horrific states, clearly shells of their former selves and mutated beyond measurement to boot. This is your fate, no matter what ending you choose. You know you’re going to one day be in their place, defending the Elden Ring like a mindless husk clinging to your former glory.
7 Bloodborne
The End of The Hunt
Bloodborne is one of the darker and creepier stories out there, but the gist of it is you need to survive an event called The Hunt and end the Beast Scourge in the process.
It gets very complicated along the way on just how to do that, but eventually, you figure it out and confront Gehrman, who has been playing coy the whole game as to who he really is. He’s the first hunter, and his wish is to end The Hunter’s Dream, which is where he is trapped, once and for all.
In order to do that, he has to kill you in the Hunter’s Dream, which you can actually accept. So if you do accept, well, that’s the game – you are killed and awaken in the real world, but it seems like the cycle continues, so that’s not really winning.
If you decline, you kill Gehrman, freeing him from the Hunter’s Dream once and for all, but then, the Moon Presence shows up. If you haven’t collected a handful of extremely obscurely placed items, it swallows you whole and the game ends, which doesn’t feel like winning either.
Now, if you collect all of the items you need, you will reject the Moon Presence, and fight it in a battle. If you win, you become a baby squid that will grow into a Great One at some point, which is a multidimensional Eldritch God. And that doesn’t feel very much like winning either.
6 Red Dead Redemption 2
A Noble Sacrifice
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a tragic story any way you look at it, but coming from the first game, you just know that things do not end well for our protagonist. Arthur Morgan.
Stories about gangs rarely have happy endings, and Red Dead Redemption 2 is no different. Towards the end of the game, the gang is exposed, and it’s clear that they have a traitor in their midst. Once it’s discovered to be Micah, the Pinkertons close in, and it’s a chaotic scene as Arthur and company try to get away.
You have the option here to either go for the money or try to save John Marston from an early grave. The problem with that choice is that no matter what you choose, Arthur, our loveable outlaw, will die.
And even worse than this, if you try to save John, that’s great and all, but many of us played Red Dead Redemption and know that John doesn’t get a happy ending either and still sees that early grave. It’s as sad as it gets and a masterful bit of writing on Rockstar’s part. The situation is dire and there is no way to avoid it, but you can at least do a little bit good on the way out.
5 Spec Ops: The Line
Arc of Darkness
Spec Ops: The Line is a character study unlike any other. Throughout your playthrough, you watch your protagonist go from heroic soldier to a victim to the circumstances of war. You spend hours and hours mowing down soldiers, and after a while, you start to feel like this probably isn’t going to end well.
That’s the brutal truth, as it’s revealed the colonel you’ve been going to find has been dead the whole time, and everything you’ve been hearing from him has been in your head.
It leaves you with a harrowing choice: Do you accept the truth that you’ve gone insane? Turn the gun on yourself? Take control and live as a renegade and become the villain you came to apprehend? It’s one of the more shocking endings I’ve seen in a game. One thing is for sure, and that’s that no ending is good.
There is no winning. You’re a soldier who’s gone too far. John Walker will never be the same again, even if you choose to have him surrender and go home. There is no home after what you did in Dubai, and there is no winning. It’s a great lesson that most games about war never even approach.
4 The Last of Us Part 2
Too Far Gone
The Last of Us Part 2 deals with heartbreak of many varieties. It’s a linear game, and not an RPG, so you’re just along for the ride here without choice in what happens throughout the game.
You play as Abby and Ellie, two opposing forces on a collision course towards nothing remotely good. Ellie is driven by the death of her father figure, Joel, and Abby is driven by the death of her friends at the hands of Ellie’s revenge. It’s a bad situation through and through, and after Ellie chooses to hunt down Abby one final time, you know that no one is going home happy.
When you get to the finale of the game, you have a brutal fight with Abby, and are about to deal the killing blow, until you don’t. Ellie gives up and lets Abby live as she rows away. Ellie is left broken, finally understanding that more killing will get people nowhere. She returns home to find Dina and her baby gone. She chose revenge and didn’t get it, and in the process lost the only person close to her left in the world.
It’s as brutal of an ending as there is, and with the zombie virus still fully running rampant and Ellie all alone, well, there’s not much more depressing than that.
3 Death Stranding
Delaying the Inevitable
In Death Stranding, the whole point of the game is to reconnect the United Cities of America. It’s a long, arduous journey, and when you finally reach its end, you find out that all your hard work has been for nought, as you’ve actually just made it easier for Amelie to trigger the final extinction event.
But not all is lost, as Sam convinces her that humanity is worth letting live if just a little bit longer, and that heartfelt pitch actually works, but there’s a catch. Amelie simply agrees to delay the final extinction for a little bit. That’s all. There is no resolution. No celebration. Humanity just gets to live a little bit longer. It could all be gone tomorrow, you have no idea either way.
It’s a tough ending to a game that, initially, nobody knew if it would get a sequel. It was basically like meeting this apocalyptic messenger and being told, “You’ve got a few more days, don’t worry.” It’s a dread-filled ending that doesn’t feel anywhere close to winning.
2 Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
History Gets In The Way
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is an incredibly long game, and when you finally reach the ending sequence, you know there is only one way for the game to end. Alfred has to die. It’s the only possible ending. So you go through the epic final battle alongside all of the allies that you’ve gathered throughout your travels, and you finally reach your target.
But things don’t go as planned, and he escapes. You win the battle but not the war. And there is no resolution at all. It feels like the last chapter of the game has been ripped out, and while Eivor still lives and everything is good for the most part with his clan, the ultimate villain roams free.
That’s likely because that’s not how he actually died in real life, and Assassin’s Creed tends to try and stick to that history (to an extent, at least). But nonetheless, going through all of that to not even really win in the end is among one of the biggest gaming disappointments I can remember.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
