The Last of Us Part II
The Last of Us is a story of human wrongdoing and striving in the face of a hellish apocalypse, so it makes sense that there would be some harrowing moments. With that said, the ending of The Last of Us II comes after Ellie has lost everything in her quest for revenge, and her being unable to play the guitar – which is her last connection to Joel – proves it.
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
The Kingdom Hearts games are known for having pretty dense lore and immense, universe-changing stakes, but that doesn’t mean they can’t tell smaller, more intimate stories too. In 2009’s Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, you the player are forced to kill your best friend, erasing all memories of her in the process. There’s justification for it in the narrative, but it’s still pretty dark.
Telltale’s The Walking Dead
Telltale’s The Walking Dead is a pretty heavy game throughout, but its ending provides a serious gut punch. After spending the entire game watching Lee Everett protect a young girl named Clementine, the chapter comes to its end with Everett being bitten by a walker. The player is then forced to choose whether Clementine kills Everett or leaves him to continue on as a zombie.
BioShock Infinite
Games that feature discussions of quantum physics, time travel and multiple universes aren’t always necessarily the most emotionally devastating, but BioShock Infinite delivers on both science and story in spades. At the end of the game, it is revealed that Elizabeth’s father Booker DeWitt is actually the villainous Zachary Hale Comstock, and multiple versions of Elizabeth appear to drown her father, hoping to end the cycle of her own torment.
Red Dead Redemption II
John Marston, the heroic protagonist of the first Red Dead Redemption game, is avenged by the narrative after his end, making the bitter loss of the character sting a little less. Arthur Morgan, the protagonist of the game’s sequel, is afforded no such grace. Instead, he succumbs to battle injuries and tuberculosis while watching the sunrise, all alone and with no one to avenge him.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
In many ways, the ending of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a happy one. For one, you do manage to revive your sick father and restore him to health, which was your primary goal. Unfortunately, you also lose one of the two brothers that you’ve played throughout the game, in a truly heart-rending death scene that is guaranteed to stick with you.
Life is Strange
Life is Strange is a beautiful and unique game that is eerie and captivating throughout, but becomes truly haunting at the end. Max Caulfield, who has returned to her hometown of Arcadia Bay to investigate the death of her childhood friend Chloe, is forced to choose between letting her die or dooming the town, with misery guaranteed to follow either outcome.
Arkham City
The Arkham games are filled with no shortage of horror, violence and scares, but they also manage to deliver more subtle emotions. In Arkham City, you are tasked with saving both yourself, as Batman, and your nemesis the Joker, from the toxin that is killing you both. In a nihilistic twist that’s hard to take, Joker destroys the cure because he doesn’t believe that you would ever save him.
Marvel’s Spider-Man
Marvel’s Spider-Man is a Spider-Man adaptation, and that means there has to be an impossibly difficult choice and a tear-jerking conclusion. In this video game, Peter Parker is forced to choose between saving the people of the city or his elderly guardian Aunt May. There’s only one correct choice and, as a final dagger, May reveals she knew Parker was Spider-Man with her dying breath.
To the Moon
To the Moon has a sweet title and a nostalgic art style, so you’d be forgiven for expecting a pretty saccharine story. Instead, the game wrestles with the ethics of false memory implantation, the long-ranging consequences of childhood trauma, and the ways in which surviving relationships are affected by lost ones. Johnny does eventually make it to the moon, but it’s bittersweet.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time
In this time-bending magical adventure, you play an amnesiac human who has taken the form of a Pokémon, fighting to restore time to its normal order. After completing an adventure with your chosen partner, you are erased from existence because of your dealings with the future. Your partner is left sobbing on the path as you disappear – although a post-credits scene shows a magical reunion.
Red Dead Redemption
Although Red Dead Redemption II’s ending is particularly bleak, it’s made more tragic by the events at the end of the original RDR game. Former outlaw John Marston embarks on a mission to track down and kill his old companions, on government orders. But as he returns to his family homestead for a peaceful life, he is betrayed by the government and gunned down by a soldier.
Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight sees you play as an unnamed warrior trying to fight against a mysterious infection that has begun to blight the land. In one possible ending, you end up locking your ally Hornet into an eternal prison to suffer alongside the Hollow Knight, a vessel for the infection.
SOMA
There are no happy endings in this 2015 survival game, where you play a severely injured man whose brain has been uploaded to a modified corpse in an extra-terrestrial power center, long after Earth has been destroyed by a comet. Towards the end of your adventures, your companion Catherine dies from over-exertion and you are left alone, drifting in space. A post-credits scene, however, shows a copied version of you waking alongside Catherine in a paradise.
Resident Evil Village
Resident Evil Village’s story expansion, Shadows of Rose, shows Ethan Winter’s ghostly form reunited with his 16-year-old daughter Rose, for whom he gave his life to save from a supernatural kidnapping plot. He appears briefly to defend her once more against the evil Miranda, only to fade away again. Rose pays a final visit to his grave before setting off on a military mission.
Assassin’s Creed: Mirage
In this game, Basim Ibn Ishaq lives in Baghdad in 861 AD. As a child, he is haunted by a terrible jinni, and his one source of comfort is his best friend Nehal. As a grown man, Basim realizes that Nehal was never real, and was just a coping mechanism for his repressed memories. Not only that, but Basim himself turns out to be a reincarnation of the Norse God Loki.
Heavy Rain
In one ending of the action-adventure game Heavy Rain, bereaved father Ethan Mars fights to save his abducted surviving son from a serial killer, only for he himself to be wrongly framed as the culprit. Ethan ends up taking his own life as he languishes in a prison cell, while his ally, the FBI agent Norman, meets a similar fate out of guilt.
Shadow of the Colossus
In Shadow of the Colossus, you play as an adventurer named Wander who is tasked with resurrecting a cruelly-sacrificed girl named Mono. After a fateful warning, Wander turns into a corrupted demonic force, and ultimately loses his life in the battle to save Mono. Mono, however, survives and discovers a horned baby that resembles the transformed Wander.
Link’s Awakening
In this installment of The Legend of Zelda, Link travels by ship to Koholint Island and embarks on a mission to get himself back home. After fighting against terrifying demons, Link discovers that the island and its friendly inhabitants were all a dream, and they fade away to nothingness as he finds himself floating adrift in the ocean.
Ghost of Tsushima
At the end of this samurai adventure, hero Jin Sakai is forced to duel his uncle and guardian, Lord Shimura, in a fight neither of them wants. Jin wins the duel and is left with the devastating choice to either kill Shimura and honor him with a warrior’s death, or spare him and break the code they live by. Whatever the player chooses, Jin is left as a hated enemy of the Shogun.
Professor Layton and The Unwound Future
As the end of Professor Layton and the Unwound Future draws near, we discover that the heroes’ companion Celeste is actually a time-traveling Claire – Layton’s girlfriend who died in an accident many years ago. As her time-traveling abilities dwindle, we see Claire return once more to her dying body, but not before she and Layton bid each other a tearful farewell.
That Dragon, Cancer
This art game is an autobiographical work about a couple whose son died from cancer as a toddler. The game takes you through different friends’ and families’ reactions to the baby Joel’s diagnosis, his death, and the subsequent fallout. Reviewer Lucy O’Brien described the game as “imperfect, but unforgettable”.
Bloodborne
Following a strange blood transfusion, the player character known only as the Hunter in Bloodborne goes on a fantastical adventure to defeat a plague in a ruined Gothic city. In one potential ending, the Hunter defeats an ancient eldritch being, only to be transformed into an infant eldritch being himself and taken away by a living doll.
Final Fantasy XV
In Final Fantasy XV, the hero Prince Noctis travels across the land to make a marriage alliance with a distant nation. When his betrothed, Lunafreya, is murdered, Noctis fights to restore order in their kingdoms and eventually sacrifices himself to cure the kingdom from a terrible plague.
Cyberpunk 2077
In Cyberpunk 2077, you play as V, a mercenary suffering from infection via a bio-chip that results in a different personality threatening to take over their mind. Toward the end of the game, V can choose to let the bio-chip persona, Johnny, take over; fight against Johnny; or take their own life.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
This 2017 game was designed to take a more serious look at the subject of psychosis. Set in the world of Norse mythology, the game shows the Pict warrior Senua fighting a curse that makes her hear voices. She ultimately fails in her mission to bring her beheaded lover Dillion back from the dead, but comes to terms with her disorder and trauma as a result of her adventures.
Before Your Eyes
In Before Your Eyes, you play as the dead Benjamin Brynn on his voyage to the afterlife. As he recounts his life to the Ferryman, it’s revealed that he has been lying about his life as a successful artist: instead, it transpires that he died of a terminal illness before he ever achieved his dreams.
Nier
In the action role-playing video game Nier, set in a distant and ruined future, you play as a family member of Yonah, a character with a terminal illness. In pursuit of a cure, you are joined on your quest by the swordsman Kainé. In one ending, as Kainé lies dying, you have the choice to sacrifice your life for hers – but doing so wipes all memories of you from the other characters’ minds, and erases all of your saved progress in the game.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Set in the midst of the Cold War, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater follows the life of CIA agent Naked Snake, who works in Russia pursuing his former mentor-turned-defector The Boss. Snake must reluctantly defeat The Boss in battle, only for her to reveal in a post-mortem film that she was actually trying to become a double agent, and had remained loyal to the USA all along.
Spiritfarer
In this game, Stella and her cat Daffodil are tasked with ferrying the dead to the afterlife and granting their final wishes. In the end, Hades announces that Stella’s body is about to die in the real world, and she must now enter the afterlife. She and Daffodil then transform into a constellation of stars.
Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter
In Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter, the character Heather is taken captive by a mystical being named Wilfre. Once Wilfre is finally vanquished, it’s revealed that Heather’s family were previously caught up in a car crash, with both of her parents dying and her brother Mike falling into a coma. However, at the very end of the game, we see Heather joyfully embrace Mike as he wakes up.
Transistor
In this game, protagonist Red is a singer who happens upon the body of a murder victim. The sword used to kill him, the Transistor, has absorbed the victim’s consciousness and she gradually befriends the man within it. Towards the game’s end, Red kills herself with the Transistor in order to be with her newfound friend.
Persona 3
The protagonist in Persona 3 is ultimately forced into a terrible choice to avoid the extinction of all life on Earth. One solution is to kill his fellow high school student Ryoji Mochizuki, who is revealed to be the physical manifestation of Death. If the player chooses to kill him, life continues but the apocalypse still looms in the near future.
Ori And The Blind Forest
In this game, the orphaned guardian spirit Ori navigates a dangerous and chaotic forest filled with obstacles. He travels with a guardian called Sein, a small orb of light. The game culminates with a reckoning against a grieving mother owl spirit, with the vengeful mother ultimately softening and heartbreakingly sacrificing herself to save the forest.
Corpse Party: Book Of Shadows
In the survival horror game Corpse Party: Book Of Shadows, a group of students from Kisaragi Academy have their memories of their supernatural adventures entirely erased, except for one student: Satoshi. Satoshi tries and fails to stop his classmates from carrying out a charm that he knows will reset time itself, but he chooses to join them rather than leave them alone in the end, knowing the danger that lies ahead.
Chrono Trigger
In one potential route of the game Chrono Trigger, the characters attempt to prevent a terrible accident that once caused Lucca’s mother to lose both her legs. If you fail to intervene, however, Lucca’s mother is pictured sitting in silence at home, heartbroken, while her husband tries and fails to console her.
Mad Father
Mad Father is a game set in Germany, following the life of the reclusive girl Aya who recently lost her mother to illness. In one of the game’s numerous possible endings, Aya permits her undead mother to take her father away into a different dimension. However, Aya is then murdered herself, and her body is transformed into a doll.
Fallout 3
In this game, you play as a resident of an underground shelter, who is forced to enter the post-apocalyptic nuclear outer world in order to find their missing father. Under the name Lone Wanderer, you become embroiled in politics and desperate battles until you come across a water purifier that could save civilization, with the wrinkle that whoever activates it will die from radiation poisoning. You must choose whether to sacrifice yourself or send in somebody else.
Spec Ops
Towards the end of Spec Ops: The Line, the player learns that the protagonist Walker’s former leader, Lieutenant Colonel John Konrad, actually took his own life after he failed in an evacuation mission, and has actually been dead for a while. All of his apparent communications with Walker were actually just chemically-induced hallucinations, and in the end, the player chooses whether or not Konrad should kill Walker.
Halo: Reach
In this 2010 game, you play as Noble Six, an elite soldier working in a squad to combat an invasion by the alien Covenant forces. In the end, faced with an impossible number of Covenant soldiers, Six is the last soldier standing and gives his life to save what’s left of humanity.
