Movies and series can take people on a wild ride, but eventually, it has to stop. The day is eventually saved, the culprit is ultimately caught, and the problem gets solved. Or the bad guys win, get away with their evil deeds, and ruin their goody-two-shoes rival’s life for good.
The same is true of video games. Mario and Sonic games generally have neat, happy endings. Others can end up bittersweet or outright grim, like theMetal Gear Solidgames orThe Last of Us. But some hide their grimmest endings behind conditions players have to fulfill. If they want to seethe darkest secret endings in video games, they have to work for it.
Being aShenmuefan means dealing with frustration. The first game tantalized players by giving them a realistic open world back when such games were in their infancy, as Ryo goes through Dobuita, Yokosuka on the trail of Lan Di, his father’s killer.Shenmue 2followed the storyto mainland Chinabut didn’t provide a conclusion. Even whenShenmue 3finally came after nearly 20 years of waiting, it still left things open.
But surprisingly, the originalShenmuedid offer a more conclusive option. It just takes a lot of lollygagging, letting Ryo stay in his hometown and not progress the story until April 15th the following year. Lan Di returns to Dobuita, and Ryo fights back and gets killed the same way as his father. No sequel hooks, no ways out. History just repeats itself. Only Ryo doesn’t have a more determined ally to avenge his fate.
Shadow Complexsaw Jason and his girlfriend Claire explore a series of caverns, only to come across an underground base run by a separatist group called the Progressive Restoration. Run by Commander Lucius, they plan to drive the US into civil war by attacking San Francisco. They also took Claire hostage for snooping, leaving Jason with no choice but to stop them.
Circumstances made him the hero of the game. But what if he didn’t want to be? Instead of going into the cavern after Claire, players could have Jason shoot his way past soldiers back to his jeep. One pressed button later, and Jason would get into it and drive off, saying “Eh, plenty of fish in the sea”. TheRemasterededition even gave it a Trophy/Achievement: “Status Update: Single”.
Not every game works out better in 3D. The PS1 version ofClock Towerpaled next toResident EvilandSilent Hill. But the original Japan-only Super Famicom version was a survival horror pioneer. It wasa point-and-click gamethat saw Jennifer Simpson attempt to escape her foster family’s mansion without getting cut up by the deadly Scissorman. Depending on how the player progresses, they’ll get one of 8 endings.
For example, if players wanted Jennifer to give her orphanage friends theShadow Complextreatment, all they had to do was head towards the garage, find the car, and then grab its keys off the nearby crate. Unlike Jason, Jennifer will pay for her choice. If she loses her friends Laura and Ann, she’ll escape but be found dead at the orphanage. If she left while one of them was still alive, the Scissorman would appear in the back seat ready to offer a shortcut.
People used to get sniffy about first-person shooters, and probably still do today. But the genre is capable of more intriguing gameplay and story beats than headshotting terrorists for yuks.Singularity, for example, saw Marine Captain Renko discover an electromagnetic surge on an uninhabited Russian island that sent him back to 1955, where he saved a scientist called Demichev.
But doing this changed his timeline, where Demichev became a world-dominating tyrant. After trying to fix the timeline, Renko will end up with two choices. If they kill Demichev, he’ll go back, stop himself from rescuing Demichev, and everything goes back to normal. Kill his rival Barisov, and he’ll rule alongside Demichev. But if Renko kills both men, he’ll let the world fall into ruin, with himself as its time-manipulating ruler.
Fighting games have had all sorts of endings-happy, sad, weird, etc. Though they’re not really ‘secret’. Even after the player unlocks its hidden characters, getting their endings is as straightforward as the default roster: beat arcade mode.Tekken 5switched things up as its final boss, Jinpachi Mishima, wasn’t actually playable without using a Gameshark or Action Replay. He was too broken for human hands.
Yet he still had an arcade ending. If players lost to him and ran out of the countdown on the Continue screen, they’d see Jinpachi mourn his fate. Without a fighter strong enough to stop him, his devil form overtakes his mind, and he completes his monstrous transformation. It’s unknown what happens after that, except that “the world will never be the same” as a result.
To thinkMass Effectused to be everywhere. The ending to its 3rd game was controversial enough, butMass Effect: Andromedaended up putting the series to bed for the foreseeable future. There’s always a chance it could come back, but whether it’d reach the heights ofMass Effect 2again is another matter. Shepard & co’s quest to stop the Collectors has received the most glowing praise from fans and critics alike.
The game ultimately culminates in a suicide mission where, depending on whom the player picks to go alongside them, can go off without anyone dying. If they make enough wrong choices, everyone in Shepard’s crew will die. If they’re lucky, Shepard can be the sole survivor. Otherwise, they’ll fall short of getting rescued too, leaving only their pilot Joker to tell Shepard’s story.
The Sufferingis one of themore underrated horror shootersfrom the mid-2000s. Sentenced to death, Torque arrives at the prison on Carnate Island right when it’s struck by an earthquake. The prison comes under attack from supernatural monsters, and in the chaos, Torque finds a way to break loose from his bonds. But now he has to find a way back to safety and confront demons both real and personal along the way.
He got sent to death row for murdering his family, but depending on the player’s choices, the surrounding circumstances are different. In the good ending, they were killed by a crime lord’s goons. In the neutral ending, Torque killed his wife by accident, leading his son to kill his brother before taking his own life. But in the bad ending, he kills them all deliberately, where he succumbs to his impulses and becomes a monstrous creature.
By contrast,Heavy Rainhasn’t aged too well. At the time, it was a unique, interactive experience as players helped Ethan Mars and co-tracked down the Origami Killer, a serial murderer who used paper cranes as his calling card. But much of its storytelling elements came off as forced and melodramatic. Still, its strongest scenes still hold up today, including its darker endings.
The game has seven endings, all based onwhich decisions the player makes, and Ethan dies in 4 of them. The worst outcome was the ‘Helpless’ ending. Successfully framed for the Origami Killer’s crimes, with his last-surviving son dead, and surrounded by paper cranes in his cell, Ethan chooses to end it all by hanging himself.
Made as a response to kill-happy games likeDynasty Warriors,Drakengardis a messed-up game where none of its 5 endings are really happy. In Ending B saw its world succumb to monstrous Valkyrie-like creatures. Ending C has Caim and his reluctant dragon ally Angelus break their pact and fight each other. While Ending A led to the disappointingDrakengard 2.
Endings D and E are the most notorious ones. By completing all 12 main chapters and the 3 subchapters, Caim and co would see the Queen Beast and her giant babies, the Grotesqueries, come to take over the world. Completing the game 100% would get the same ending, only Caim, Angelus, and the Queen Beast get teleported to Tokyo for a rhythm-based boss fight that ends with thedigital equivalent of the dev’s contempt.
CallingUndertale’s Genocide ending ‘secret’ doesn’t seem accurate nowadays. Both it and the path to it have been covered in detail, often with its happier ‘Pacifist’ counterpart, making both arguably more common than the game’s multiple neutral endings. Still, that doesn’t stop the Genocide ending being scary, grim, and rather hard to get. Players have to hang around each part of the game, killing everyone in the random battles until literally no one shows up.
Then they have to kill every boss. In response, Undyne will fight back even harder, and Sans will get involved, becoming the hardest boss in the game. Getting to kill Flowey is satisfying, but meeting Chara is another story. They’ll kill the player, then essentially kill the game, tainting happier playthroughs with their presence (“You want to go back to the world you destroyed”).
