Summary
While some games like to end on a high note, others prefer to hit their players with one last splash of unadulterated misery in their final acts, whether games likeBloodborneorHeavy Rain. When done right, these dark endings can provide a game’s story with an especially profound climax that leaves players thinking long after the credits roll. Everyone may enjoy a happy ending, but these games relish the feelings of loss that a good story can provide for its audience and pull them off so well that they have become unforgettable.
Warning: This article contains discussions of suicide.
Most of the games here are PlayStation exclusives, and all of them are available on PS consoles. Each of them has gained some level of fame (or infamy) for the bleak conclusions to their stories. Some are plain sad, others disturbing, but each of them is undoubtedly dark. This article will contain spoilers for the talked-about games.
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Of all FromSoftware’s titles,Bloodbornesticks out as the darkest, both literally and tonally. The Gothic settingBloodbornetakes place in, and the Lovecraftian nature of its enemies make the game a fascinating and horrific experience throughout. Especially when it comes to the game’s three endings, the themes of dangerous knowledge and the loss of humanity are impossible to ignore.
There are a total ofthree different endings inBloodborne.
Somehow, the cheeriest ending is to surrender to Gherman, the player’s mentor, and let him perform a brutal execution. This"kills" the player but simultaneously releases them from the Hunter’s Dream, allowing them to possibly return to a normal life. However, this would seemingly render the player’s actions futile and fail to achieve their goals in coming to Yharnam in the first place. The next option is to fight Gherman for his position as the leader of the Hunter’s Dream. This ending sees the playerkill their mentor and find themselves bound to a wheelchair, the servant of an eldritch horror.
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The last and most difficult-to-achieve ending sees the player defeat not only Gherman but also the being controlling the Hunter’s Dream, the Moon Presence. Afterward,the player turns into a slimy, tentacle-like creature, now destined to become a being like the Moon Presence and gain unspeakable power. None of these endings net a happy conclusion for the player character or the world, and none of them seem particularly desirable. While it is ambiguous what happens after each ending cut scene, if the inhospitable world ofBloodbornethus far is any indication, it won’t be good.
Until Dawnis a horror game that brought the stakes of choose-your-own-adventure style stories to new heights. It places the player in control of ten teens in the Washington wilderness who are being hunted by evil forces, both human and supernatural. The player makes choices for each of the characters to either help them survive or lead to their untimely deaths.
Thegame’s ending can vary wildly depending on player choices, from saving almost every one of the characters to getting them all killed in violent fashions. Even if every character survives, they end up traumatized and scarred by the horrible events of the game. A few characters, such as Jessica, seem to be almost a broken shell of their former selves, even in the best-case scenario.
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One character who will always be lost is Josh, one of the game’s “villains” who puts his friends throughSaw-like traps as revenge for their involvement in the death of his sisters. While Josh is hard to like, given his actions, he is implied to have a serious mental illness that warps his perception of the world, and it is hard to fully judge him for his wrongdoings due to this and the loss he recently experienced. Theending of the game sees him either killed by the zombified husk of one of his sisters or turned into a monster himself, both of which seem like pretty cruel and undeserved fates for his character.
Shadow of the Colossusis a beautiful but tragic game in which the main character, Wander, seeks to resurrect a girl named Mono, who was killed unjustly. To do so, he seeks out a dark entity that promises to bring her back to life if Wander can kill several Colossus creatures in an area called the Forbidden Lands. At first, the creatures seem aggressive and possibly evil, justifying Wander’s quest against them.
However, over time, it becomes evident that many of Colossi are simply harmless or even benevolent and that Wander’s killings are driving him down a dark path. Nevertheless, the goal of the game remains to kill these creatures, and the player must do so to reach the end. The ending sees Wander fully consumed by darkness andtaken advantage of by the entity he dealt with, losing his life and body after defeating the last of the Colossi.
The entity, called Dormin, does hold up its end of the bargain and resurrects Mono. However, the Forbidden Lands are sealed to keep Dormin from escaping, and Mono is trapped in the same realm where Wander killed so many to save her. Theending does see Wander left behind as a baby, who Mono picks up, but overall, this ending is pretty dark. Mono is left alone, and the player’s actions are revealed as serving a great evil, potentially dooming the world.
Returnalis part rogue-like, part shooter, part horror, and all demonstrably upsetting. It follows Selene, an astronaut stuck in a time loop on a strange plant seeking escape. Or maybe it follows Selene through her psyche as she tries to unpack her trauma. Or maybe it follows Selene in the moments before her death, working through the events of her life in a surreal manner. There are many interpretations of the game’s events, none of them confirmed or outright invalidated.
What is for sure is that theReturnal’s endingsare both dark for Selene. Throughout the story, the player learns about her struggles with the astronaut program, her mother, and (possibly) her child. It is clear that she has gone through serious traumatic experiences that have driven her both to seek out connection and move towards isolation in a self-deprecating cycle. There is also some business about a car crash caused by anastronaut standing in the middle of the road, causing a mother and her child to derail and end up in the water.
That last part might be a metaphor, or it could be literal. Either way,Returnal’sending sees Selene as the one driving the car and losing the child in the crash, OR as the astronaut standing in the road. This implies that,whatever tragedy actually happened, Selene blames herself for it, and is unable to move past it, stuck in a loop of self-hatred.
Part one ofThe Last Of Usseries ends with a famous choice from its protagonist, Joel: saving Ellie, the child he has come to care for as his daughter, at the expense of the entire world. This is the culmination of an entire game’s worth of characterization and relationship-building. The story ofThe Last Of Usfollows Joel, an embittered survivor of a fungal zombie apocalypse, transporting a girl named Ellie across the country. Ellie is immune to the fungus that destroyed humanity and could be the key to creating a cure.
At the beginning, Ellie is nothing more than cargo to Joel, but over time, he comes to believe she may actually be the key to saving the world. As they travel together, they become close, saving one another from danger countless times and opening up about their pasts. However, when they finally reach the doctor that could create a cure from Ellie’s brain, Joel discovers that doing so would kill her.
Choosing Ellie’s life over the rest of the world,Joel massacres the building full of freedom fighters and the surgeon who could create the curein order to get her out. Joel then lies to Ellie about what happened, claiming that she isn’t special and the cure can’t be made, omitting the multiple murders he committed to save her life and leaving her in the dark. This endingshocked audiencesand remains one of the most brutal yet well-written conclusions to a story in video game history. However, the game’s sequel just might have it beat in terms of darkness.
Silent Hill 2is another game where reality is put into question, and certain events may or may not take place in the protagonist’s head. The protagonist, in this case, James, spends the game searching for his supposedly dead wife, Mary, and running into a number of monsters created from his psyche. Along the way, he meets other characters, some other people stuck in the town of Silent Hill and facing their own demons, others likely figments of James’s imagination.
The game has a number of endings, which all revolve around the discovery that James likely killed his wife, Mary, as she was suffering from an incurable disease and that he likely brought himself here as a form of punishment for his actions. After this, some players may choose to leave Silent Hill with one of the other surviving characters or, in some cases, attempt to resurrect Mary through an ancient power in the town.
The two undisputed darkest endings, however, are referred to as “In Water” and “Maria.”
In Water sees James killing himself by driving into water out of griefover his actions and the loss of his wife. Maria, meanwhile, sees James leave Silent Hill with a character named Maria, likely a manifestation of his wife that isn’t actually real and probably just James deluding himself out of guilt.Both endings see James fail to process his grief and guiltin a healthy way and destroy himself over it.
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Heavy Rainis a mystery game where the player follows the perspectives of multiple characters, each tied to the mysterious Origami Killer in some way or another. Depending on the choices the player makes, they may discover the killer’s true identity, save certain NPCs, and even catch the murderer in the end. However, this is not always the case.
If the player makes the worst choices possible during the game’s runtime, they may end up with a truly awful ending that is almost hilariously terrible for everyone involved. Not only canthe real Origami Killer get away scot-free, killing most of the other characters in the meantime, but he may also frame another character, Ethan, for the crimes.This ending sees Ethan killing himself in prisonand the lives of pretty much every character entirely ruined. There are certainly better endings available in the story, but this conclusion is one of the worst and darkest of all time.
Telltale’sWalking Deadseries started out strong with this title, following the protagonist, Lee, and a girl named Clementine he has taken into his care. While Lee’s own morality is ambiguous, with him possibly having murdered a man over having an affair with his wife, he is a likable and fatherly figure to Clementine during the events of the zombie apocalypse. He manages to teach her about survival while sparing her from the majority of the world’s bloodshed and decay.
Almost all of it. In the last chapters of the game,Lee is bitten by a walker while searching for a kidnapped Clementine, and has only hours left to live. Despite this, he manages to get the girl back from her captor and get her to safety, just as his strength gives out. At this point,Clementine will be left alone in the world, and Lee will die.
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That isn’t even the worst part, however. The final choice the game offers is whether to have Clementine leave Lee before he turns into a walker himself, or to have him ask her to shoot him in the head and put him out of his misery. No matter what decision the player makes, the outcome is heart-wrenching for Lee and Clementine, asthe girl either has to leave him to suffer or shoot her guardian. It’s an unenviable choice to say the least, and no matter what, Clem will end up traumatized by the loss.
Life Is Strangeis infamous for its tragic endings, forcing players to choose between letting their closest friend die alone or destroying their entire hometown. The game follows Max Caulfield, a teen who discovers she can manipulate time as she tries to save her estranged friend Chloe from death and a truly creepy killer. The game takes place over one week as Max and Chloe reconnect, a mysterious figure attempts to kidnap them, and a natural disaster seems to build out of nowhere.
As it turns out, Max’s powers have unintentionally created a hurricane that will level her hometown of Arcadia Bay unless she goes back and never messes with time. The problem with this is that if Max undoes her time manipulation,Chloe will be shot in a bathroom alone, never reconnecting with Max or getting away from the misery of her lifeshe is desperate to escape. At the end of the game, Max must choose whether to sacrifice Chloe or the town entirely.
Even almost ten years after the game’s release, this ending still hurts.
Honestly, while both choices are dark, sacrificing the town is somehow the less sad of the two. The player doesn’t have to see the direct impact of the destruction on the survivors, instead leaving with Chloe in the hurricane’s aftermath. Sacrificing Chloe, though, is an emotional roller coaster of despair, as the player sees all the moments they shared be erased in a devastating montage that really drives home how much Max and Chloe meant to one another. Even almost ten years after the game’s release, this ending still hurts.
As dark as the ending to the first game was,The Last of Us: Part Twobuilds on that darkness and makes its world even bleaker. To start, the game kills off Joel in a brutal and somewhat controversial scene, driving Ellie down a path of revenge to get back at his killers. Along the way, Ellie murders and even tortures other people, becoming more like the monsters she claims to be hunting. Ellie’s quest to kill the main murderer, Abby,ends in tragedy, with Abby beating her, killing one of her friends, and ultimately moving past her own demons and letting Ellie live.
The game is a poignant and tragic representation of how revenge and violence beget more of the same.
This does not rub off on Ellie, as even years later when she has returned home to live with her partner Dina, she is unable to move past Joel’s death or the fact that Abby got away. Players discover that Ellie found out what Joel did in the first game, cut him out of her life for it, andnever got the chance to reconnect with him before his death. This continues to haunt her and keeps her from being happy, and when a lead on Abby’s whereabouts comes along, Ellie deserts her family to go after her.
In the end, though, Ellie finds and almost kills Abby, but she does not go through with it. She returns to an empty home, Dina having left her over her obsession, and tries to strum a tune on the guitar Joel left her. However, she lost some fingers in the fight with Abby and can no longer play, illustrating how much her search for revenge took from her. While Ellie may survive and what happens after the story ends is not known, the game isa poignant and tragic representation of how revenge and violence beget more of the same.
