10 Super Depressing Video Game Endings That Totally Bummed Us Out

While there are plenty of games to focus solely on gameplay, design, and mechanics, what sets many games apart are their memorable characters and stories. In the many hours of which players are plugged into their systems, addictive narratives and/or gameplay intend to keep them determined to finish their journeys to the end, to be rewarded by progressing and completing the story themselves.

Though consumers usually expect to finish their heroes’ expeditions, rescue missions, or whatever else may be the case, certain games have left players with a feeling that, despite all their efforts through the story, things just don’t always work out the way they should.

10 Professor Layton: The Unwound Future

The friendly and warm puzzle adventure games are known for not shying away from having an emotional core. Players come to love the game’s characters, particularly its namesake, the kind, intelligent, and curious gentlemen that is Professor Layton.

In the third installment of the series, Layton’s past is finally revealed, having been a relatively mysterious and private character. When it is revealed bit-by-bit in flashbacks, it all comes to a head as the Professor is forced to re-live his trauma from the past. For the first time in the games, not only is he is shown crying and shouting, which is bizarre, as Layton is known for always keeping a level head, but he also takes off his hat for the first time on screen to mourn. As any PL fan is aware: Layton makes it a point never to take off his hat. This has caused many a player young and old to break down into sympathetic tears and the character.

9 Bioshock Infinite

Time travel and interdimensional misadventure are sure to complicate any narrative, and Bioshock Infinite, adamant about having twist endings, leaves the player with a sense of loss. The protagonist, Booker DeWitt, is forced to sacrifice his life upon knowing that his alternate self is also a ruthless dictator.

Multiple versions of Elizabeth drown him in in a lake where he had previously attended a baptism. This seems to fix the timeline, and multiple Elizabeths disappear, leaving on a heavy note.

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8 That Dragon, Cancer

An emotional ride throughout, this autobiographical video game doubles as a way to cope and upholds the preservation of precious memories, even if it means remembering the bad ones, too. Its style has an edge of childishness in its simplistic yet imaginative designs, settings, and bright colors. It tells the story of the game developer, or rather, his toddler son, as he is effaced with terminal cancer.

Rather than focusing on the tragedy, the ending offers the player a moment where they can see the child off before death, for him to be happy, healthy, and safe in a peaceful forest. The final goodbye is one of the most ultimate tearjerkers.

7 Lisa: The Painful

Set in a strange dystopian world where most women have died out, Brad, a stoic man talented in karate and killing, takes in a female baby. He names her Buddy and raises her only to find she’s been kidnapped by those who hope to exploit her. Brad eventually has the chance to murder anyone who gets in his way, though to a great cost. He is severely injured, and Buddy is furious at him, convinced he’d taken away any chance at her having a future.

As Brad dies, he asks to be held, which is left up to the player as to whether Buddy does so. After Buddy leaves behind Brad’s body, we’re brought back to Brad only to find he’s disturbingly and sadly mutated by a drug called ‘Joy’ he was addicted to.

6 Inside

Playdead’s melancholic and atmospheric puzzle platformer occurs in a world where mind control and scientific experiments rule the setting, making death a possibility at almost every corner. After the entirety of the exhausting journey that the boy goes on, he finds himself falling into a vat of water inhabited by a large, amorphous creature made out of human bodies. The boy sets it free only to be absorbed by it, never to be seen again.

The creature escapes into a desperate ramage, crushing and trampling over several people as it goes. It runs forward clumsily, collectively moaning and gasping as it suffers, frequently falling off tall ledges and yelling out in pain. The creature lumbers quick to escape the facility, and, in a rare moment of peace, it rests in a sunny green patch. The credits roll, leaving the player more somber and with more questions than before about this intense and terrifying game.

5 Telltale’s The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is no stranger to killing off its characters. In the brutal first season’s end, the protagonist Lee, acting father-figure to a young Clemintine, is mortally wounded by a walker bite. In an emotional scene, he instructs Clementine on how to escape as she’s forced to face a zombie and handcuff Lee to a heater before he turns.

His parental advice and care make their inevitable departure all the more heartbreaking. Clem almost gets caught by the zombie, screaming and panicking, and Lee sits helplessly when she ends up killing the zombie herself. Clem is then forced to decide whether or not to end Lee’s misery or let him become a zombie. Either choice is a hard call to make.

4 To the Moon

This fantasy adventure game’s ending is a tearjerker as John, a man who has always wanted to go to the moon since he was a child, is dying. Two people from a special task force search through his life to find ways to replace his memories before he passes on.

The game’s finale sees through to a bittersweet ending as players see the tragedies in John’s life mended, surrounded by the people he loves. He ultimately fulfills his dream in an emotional ending, erasing his regrets and replacing them with happiness.

3 Limbo

Though Playead’s Inside is far more elaborate and offers more food for thought, Limbo’s association with death and fear in eerie minimalist delivery haunts and torments the player in frustrating and intense gameplay. The protagonist, a silhouetted boy, travels a harsh and oppressively-gloomy landscape as he searches for a girl, the comforting and human piece in a cruel and threatening world.

The game wraps up with a sense of loss and mystery as the boy is sent through a gravity-defying veil to find the girl working in the dirt under a treehouse with a ladder. She stands up sometime after he stops and stares at her from a distance, sensing he is near. Cut to black, and credits roll. On the main screen, the ladder is broken while flies buzz, causing some to theorize that’s how the boy had died.

2 Darkwood

This fascinating and gorgeously-dark story of Darkwood can be described as Lovecraftian horror. The character, fed up by the inescapability of the madness, sickness, and violence that takes place in his terrifying world, goes mad, taking a flame to as much of the forest as he can. The player tries to navigate through the fire, burning and killing many as the character literally asphyxiates death. After a long and miserable experience in which the player is forced to survive monsters and corruption, they are offered no relief in the end.

1 Detention

In the horror game set during the White Terror, a student travels a terrifying reality of her school as dark memories reveal themselves. The truth of all the bloodshed and monstrosity lies within her own head as she recognizes herself as not only a catalyst and murderer by proxy, but also a victim of severe systematic appropriation. The real-life event is realized in its entirety as the player, like the protagonist, is forced to weigh the actions of those raised under the fear of authority, loss of love and expression, and death.

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