10 Bleak Video Game Endings You Can't Escape From
Well, that was a bummer!
These days, it’s easy to expect a game to feature some kind of good or true ending for doing extra work.
The developers seem to like to reward players that invest a lot of time in their games, and a nicer ending where all your favorite characters get to live happily ever after is the easiest way to do so.
Except some games don’t like to play nice.
In titles where the setting is a bleak and depressing world, you shouldn’t really expect things to end on a pleasant note. Indeed, some such games are so committed to the bummer story they are trying to tell that, despite having multiple endings, every single one of them is worse than the last.
Games like this don’t want any of their characters to have a good time. No matter what you do and how much time you invest into helping them, every single character you care about and love will either die or suffer a fate worse than death.
This kind of fatalist scenario can be an interesting break from the usual good ending/bad ending dichotomy, so if you’re looking for a breath of fresh but demoralizing air, the following titles are for you!
Major spoilers follow.
10. It's Kill Or Be Infected - Dying Light
The fast undead of Dying Light are no joke. So much so that even the game's endings try to show how screwed the world is with all of them running around.
Despite the base game having a predetermined ending, the DLC allows the player to decide the fate of the people of Harran, and, well, let's just say neither of the choices leave much hope for humanity's survival.
The DLC focuses on the protagonist Kyle Crane's discovery of a sentient Infected called Mother. Although she is part of the undead, she wants to protect humanity from the plague, and in order to do so, she tells Kyle to activate nukes that would blow up his city.
However, since Harran is filled with his friends, the choice feels devastating, and so most people would opt for defying Mother instead.
The problem is that if you do so, you do not protect Harran. Opposition leads to Mother infecting Kyle with the virus before dying, and then the hero runs away to spread the plague all over the world, overrunning the survivors with the zombie horde.
The ending choice is just two degrees of apocalypse, showing you that the humanity is doomed to fail against the infection.