10 Seriously Dark Video Game Endings

5. Soma

Frictional Games is famous for their Amnesia games but their 2015 survival horror outing Soma was a serious sleeper hit that deserves your attention if it passed you by. The game centres around an underwater research facility which you’re exploring as Simon Jarrett, a man from 2015 who has awoken in the facility in 2104 after a mass extinction event took out all of humanity.

You believe you’re speaking with a woman named Catherine but discover she is a brain scan, as is Simon himself existing in a modified corpse of one of the ship’s personnel. Simon faces robots who want to kill him, and some who don’t, horrific circumstances, and the fallout of the events of the facility.

This is all in his effort to recover the ARK, a black box housing a simulated world and the brain scans of all the personnel aboard the facility. Yeah, this one is hard to properly describe in just a few sentences.

At the end of Simon’s mission he succeeds. Kinda. He sends the ARK off into space but, of course, he doesn’t go with it. It’s a copy of Simon and Catherine’s consciousness that were transferred into the ARK and not the versions we’ve been playing as and alongside. The two argue and Catherine’s cortex chip short-circuits, killing her, and leaving Simon helpless and alone, trapped in the facility on a devastated Earth.

The ARK versions of the two are pretty stoked though, so, let’s try to think about that.