8 Video Games Where Everyone Loses

5. NieR: Automata

When your game has a staggering 26 possible endings, you’d be forgiven for thinking that at least one of them would be a ‘winning’ one. You would of course be wrong, as certifiable maniac Yoko Taro is here to prove.

Following Taro’s decision to make Drakengard’s most bonkers ending its canonical one, NieR and its subtitled sequel tell the story of a world plagued by disease, doomed by sentient androids, then invaded by aliens. There’s no time to explain any further, suffice to say that Automata picks up the action in the year 11945, following Androids 2B, 9S & A2 as they continue the seemingly endless proxy war with the machine army brought to earth by the aforementioned aliens.

Following several false endings, it is revealed that humanity and the aliens have long since perished, and that the war is doomed to repeat eternally. The canonical ending of the game (not the one where you die by eating a fish) has the Machine Intelligence launching an ark of its memories into space, hoping to find a home, whilst the deceased remnants of the trio are reconstructed by their support droids. NieR: Automata then breaks all pretense of a fourth wall, and asks you to delete your saved data, to help another player reach the end, who will then have to do exactly the same.

It’s a brilliant bit of meta-narrative philosophy, but, as your brain turns to soup looking back at the restarted title screen, you’ve got to wonder if a ‘winner’ of the war was ever really possible.