Summary
Beating a game from start to finish oftentimes feels great, especially if you’re a devout trophy or achievement hunter. Regardless, you’d probably agree that there’s something special about finishing a story that only ends after you decide between a few unexpected choices, or being left with a plot twist that you never saw coming.
If you’re looking for game endings that leave you shocked and surprised, encourage you to unleash your inner detective and reflect on all of a story’s pieces in a completely different, unexpected way, or you’re just curious about this topic in general, give the titles below a peek.
If part of you wants to experience one of these endings yourself, be careful; spoilers are ahead.
PC (Windows)
Genre(s)
Indie, RPG
With a graphical style you’d expect from the PS1 or PS2, coupled with enemies, combat mechanics, and a setting heavily influenced by an early FromSoftware game named King’s Field, you end up with a neat indie RPG called Lunacid.
Interestingly, the entirety of this game seems to be taking place in someone’s mind, perhaps your own, in one grand dream. Why does this seem to be the case? Well, when you finally beat the game, you’re greeted with real-life video footage, and a Fourth Wall break where you’re being directly addressed.
It’s safe to say that Pagan Min doesn’t seem like that great of a guy; within the first few minutes of meeting him, he repeatedly stabs one of his own military officers in the neck for failing to stop a bus when things got out of control. Despite this, Min is still a man of his word.
The whole reason you came to Kyrat is to retrieve your mother’s ashes, and at the start of the game, Min tells you to chill out for a little while and eat some crab rangoon. The funny thing is, if you wait about 15 real-life minutes, you’ll get a secret ending where he simply gives you the ashes.
As you riddle Skags with flaming bullets, lob grenades at groups of bandits, or smash zombies with a melee weapon, there is a reason for all the carnage, aside from everything wanting to kill you in the first place; you’re a vault hunter.
Seeking fortune and glory, your end goal is to break into one of the many vaults left behind by an ancient alien race, the Eridians. When you finally get inside one, though, there aren’t any riches. The only thing you see is a giant monster with tentacles called The Destroyer. This wasn’t a vault; it was a prison.
Whether it’s giant, roaming packs of predatory, mutated creatures, incredibly lethal, high-energy anomalies that blink in and out of existence, or something else, lots of funky things have been happening after humanity was forced underground into Moscow’s metro system during a post-nuclear winter.
Playing as the protagonist, Artyom, you see first-hand the fear, mistrust, and reactionary instincts of humanity in full, with at least some of that directed at the mysterious, telepathic Dark Ones. Despite it being the game’s original end goal, you’re briefly offered the option to opt out of nuking the Dark Ones, with the hope that a better, more peaceful future is possible.
While Bioshock has a few different endings, based on your decisions from the beginning to the end, the one that sticks out the most, in terms of how much it contrasts with the game’s remarkably grim and dystopian setting, is saving all the Little Sisters.
As the main antagonist,who has had a few different names, rants hysterically at the end, he is finished off by a group of Little Sisters, and suffers a gruesome death. The unexpected and magical part, however, is how the game describes the life these girls were afforded thanks to your help; to grow up, to love, and leave a hideous, twisted past behind.
Ah, the incredibly compelling, twisted universe of Dead Space. Terrifying Necromorphs lurk around every corner, Markers broadcast their mind-bending influence, and everywhere you go, there’s an unfathomable level of violence and trauma that will surely leave you with lasting psychological and emotional distress.
If you’ve played the remake, then you might’ve noticed a slightly different, secret ending; one that implies that the protagonist, Isaac, hasmore agency and free will than the original ending. This is significant, because it muddies the understanding and justification behind Isaac’s final, catastrophic action.
If you can conquer your fear of vast, open oceans, and deal with a wide variety of sea creatures, some of which are aggressive and can be easily ten or 20 times your size, then chances are you’ll be able to survive and make it to the end of Subnautica.
A telepathic leviathan communicating with you and accepting its end, fantasizing about what it will be like to ultimately pass away is quite a shock in of itself. What’s even more unexpected, however, is the absolutely absurd one trillion credit price tag you’re greeted with when you finally make it back home to Alterra.
On the surface, Inscryption seems fairly straightforward; you’re stuck in a room with a creepy fella, and under threat of violence,you’re forced to play a Roguelike card game of sorts. The farther you get, however, the stranger and more surprising things get.
Sure, seeing the game shift genres, or following the real-life tapes left behind by Luke Carder are nice touches, but that boss battle at the end where you whip out what can only be described as a stone, Yu-Gi-Oh style Duel Disk is unforgettable. Well, Carder’s murder at the end is quite a shock, too.
