10 True Video Game Endings You Gave Up On
4. Painkiller - True Ending
We're getting serious Shadow the Hedgehog vibes off this one.
Much like Shadow, Painkiller tasks its player to complete the game multiple times to see the true ending. And again, much like Shadow, the game itself offers very little reason to play through it more than once.
There are differences, of course. Painkiller only needs to be finished twice, not ten times. And where Shadow was baffingly terrible, Painkiller is just...dull. A tedious and overly long supernatural slog, Painkiller was bang average when it came out in 2004, and time has not made it shine any brighter.
As such, it's hard to see why anyone would summon the energy to not only complete the game on its hardest difficutly, but do so while fulfilling the bonus objectives on each level. And then do it all again on the newly unlocked, even harder difficulty setting, just to see the true end of a story nobody could possibly care about.
(To Painkiller's fans - yes, the stake gun was cool. But it didn't justify even one playthrough, let alone two).