10 Video Games Where It's Impossible To Have A Happy Ending

We all love a good ending, don't we? That warm, fuzzy feeling of finishing a game always makes us happy. Bosses defeated, worlds saved, total annihilation threat halted until the sequel.

But what about those that leave us feeling a bit sad afterwards? The games you walk away from, where you just want someone to pat you on the back and tell you everything will be okay. Adventures that have you questioning whether you could have done anything differently, or would it even matter if you could?

Now, it's not as black or white as just picking a binary good or bad ending.

Sometimes you think you've done the right thing, until the implications of your actions dawn on you. There are some on this list that we already know don't end well in the future, with the fates already written for those in the story.

Have you really saved the world, or just trapped the Hero of Hyrule in a perpetual time loop? Are you able to break a family's "curse", or did you honestly get vengeance for your murdered loved ones?

Now, these aren't meant to bring you down. But let's have a look at some examples where a "happy ending" is too good to be true.

Boy saves girl is a tale as old as time. Sure, it's been modernised and role-reversed, but the basic tenet is still there. Protagonist A saves Objective B, happily ever ending resolved.

When this doesn't happen, and fates are left ambiguous, we often refer to these states as "being in limbo". The fates undecided, the players unsure as to what happens next.

So kudos to Playdead, then, for hitting that nail of the head with their 2010 debut, Limbo. Delivering a haunting platformer with its minimal looks and eerie sound design, it creeped many players out with its tone. And the disgustingly massive spider, too.

It's not that Limbo has a bad ending, it's just that it doesn't have a seemingly good one, either. For all intents and purposes, our hero finds his sister in purgatory, but as he does, the screen fades to black, leaving us... well, in limbo, obviously.

It's this ambiguity, the lack of resolution and the crushing realisation that this might be it, that means there's no happy ending, and the pair are doomed to stay like this forever.