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Games with downbeat endings

SausageInYourFace

Angelic Reinforcement
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Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
Life is Strange has the choice between two very downbeat endings.

The recently rereleased Blade Runner has several different endings, some of which can be pretty downbeat.
 

Swigen

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3fe9467eccd40719db3707ceafaa2725.jpg
 
Vatnik
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Mouse Utopia
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
Age of Wonders. Of the six endings one is cheerful, two are the undead apocalypse, one is the world being damned to a sort of limbo with all Humans genocided and you defending your palace in flames against your enemies while the stars have have gone dark and the forces of good have abandoned the world, another is a good ending where you are the last elf in a world of men and your friends all went to Evermore, another is a good ending where you are the last Dark Elf in a world of men, and the Highmen brand you and render you magically mute, so you swear to spend the centuries of your life subverting all that is good and causing social corruption.

http://aow.heavengames.com/gameimages/campaign_endings.shtml
 

wyes gull

Savant
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Apr 20, 2017
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424
In Streets or Rage you can kill the other PC if you're playing 2P and then decline the final boss' offer to join him, whereupon he'll call you "evil" (lol) and when you beat him, you go on to rule the crime syndicate yourself. That end always amused me especially because all the PCs are police officers.
Contra Hard Corps/Probotector has 5(!) endings; in one you end up dying but eh, at least you get a brass statue. In another you get teleported back to dinosaur times and fuck a monkey. Don't ask.
The entirety of Dark Savior is pretty depressing (still not a much as the platforming) and out of the 5 parallels, only one has a decent ending. There's a side character you either never meet or whose footsteps you follow in, only to watch die, depending.
Panzer Dragoon Zwei and Ikaruga are also pretty downbeat. But then that's what happens when you kill the "dog" or the "dog" kills you.
 

Lemming42

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Final Fantasy 2 in that most of the world's population died despite the heroes technically saving the day.

Final Fantasy 6 for the same exact reason.

Half-Life, although it depends on how you look at it, I guess, and which ending you prefer. Either way, Gordon survived a days-long nightmarish ordeal only to end up basically getting fucked over one way or the other and never returning home.

Heretic. Everyone died before the game even started, and Corvus carries out his revenge only to get lost wandering weird shitty pain dimensions, possibly for years.

Deus Ex, subjectively. None of the endings are particularly appealing to me. Always end up going very reluctantly with the illuminati ending.

LA Noire. FUCK ROY EARLE

Unreal. Prisoner 849 survives against all odds and ends up just as imprisoned as she was at the start of the game, with the implication that if the Skaarj find her they'll kill her, and if humans find her, she'll end up back in jail. Literally the only person from the Vortex Rikers to survive though, so it's chill.

Albion. I think the devs intended it to be optimistic and upbeat, but to me it's devastating. Everyone's trapped on the planet of the dickhead cat people with no hope of escape.
 

oldbonebrown

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Jun 2, 2017
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TELAH
Lisa the Painful ends with the main character being told he was the worst offender of all that he ever tried to protect in a world of otherwise apparent meaninglessness. He then turns into a literal flesh-pile-monster. Its pretty funny in a swirling-ball-of-hurt kind of way
 
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Egosphere

Arcane
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Jan 25, 2018
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Hibernia
Pariah - mid 00s shitty sci fi fps. You're looking for some woman who is a genetic experiment or something; end up betraying her and handing her off to the bad guys; change your mind and go off to rescue her; fail. Everyone dies.

Darkwood - I'm not even gonna try and explain what that mindfuck of a game was about. There are 2 endings. The 'good' ending is a lie. The secret ending reveals the terrible truth.

Silent Hill 2 - there are a whole bunch of endings and they're all pretty depressing. There is one good ending where the protagonist makes peace with his wife's death and walks away.

Max Payne 2 (kinda) - if you get the normal ending, he's pretty much the last guy standing, having lost everything once again
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
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May 23, 2014
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Massachusettes
I have a confession to make. Though it was my favorite adventure game, I found myself trapped on a illusionary desert island near the end of Neuromancer by the game's villian -- a sentient AI perhaps much like Shodan -- with no way to get off. I tried everything. I thought that was the ending -- that big white talking head in cyperspace that looks like Agent 47 won, and I was vanquished forever into a virtual prison. I accepted it at the time, and thought: "Hmm, well, why should the player character always win in these games? Why can't the bad guy win for a change, for something different?" Yet I still considered it an awesome game. Then I discovered later in the Age of Online Solutions that you could use one of the chip implants in your head to get off the island, go back into cyberspace, and beat that white bastards's ass down. In essence I missed an entire endgame because of my own foolishness and my willingness to accept that this was a novel, enjoyable way to end a great adventure -- by losing to an unbeatable adversary that, ironically, was beatable.
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
Joined
Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
Warhammer 40k: Space Marine

Your battle bro betrays you to the Inquisition.
The ending sets the stage for a sequel that never happened.
 

ColCol

Arcane
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Jul 12, 2012
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The first two Thiefs. Garrett is no better off from when he started (if he's not in fact worse) and there's further danger on the horizon.
 

BrotherFrank

Nouveau Riche
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Vigilantes: There are 2 endings for it, I'm only familiar with the good one which is your character needs therapy to try to piece his life back together and live like a normie again. Even your merry band of crime fighters are too embarassed to see each other again because of what they did together. I imagine the bad ending would have the protagonist become a psychopath wanting to continue the cycle of violence he was embroiled in. But yeah the game makes a point of telling you that whilst your characters succeeded in cleaning up the city, there was a psychological price to pay.

Tower of time: Ending is a real tearjerker as far as I'm concerned :'( Game is good and uncovering the plot is half the fun of it though so be warned, major spoilers ahead:
Your mission to find a way to save your doomed world ends in failure and whilst you do get to the bottom of wtf happened in the tower and how the world got fucked, it's far too late to do anything about it. The only way left to save the few survivors of the world is to escape to another dimension entirely and prepare yourselves for the big bad that om nommed this world and many others. Most of your party members have to willingly give up their lives for this to happen though, and your knight dude and archer gal admit they always liked each other and die hand in hand, their skeletons immortalized in an embrace.

Star wars battlefront 2: The 501st campaign ends with the battle of hoth and your clone narrator thinking this is the end of rebellion and that the galaxy was finally at peace. We all know that sadly to not be the case...
 

moleman

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Gothic 1 is kind of downbeat. After defeating the Sleeper you're trapped under a pile of ruble and apparently dead.

This is not how the first game ends though. You get a narration by the nameless hero that he went back to surface finding the barrier down and that then his adventure really started.

The hero trapped dead under rubble was introduced in the beginning of Gothic 2.
 

Outlander

Custom Tags Are For Fags.
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Divinity: Original Sin Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Gothic 1 is kind of downbeat. After defeating the Sleeper you're trapped under a pile of ruble and apparently dead.

This is not how the first game ends though. You get a narration by the nameless hero that he went back to surface finding the barrier down and that then his adventure really started.

The hero trapped dead under rubble was introduced in the beginning of Gothic 2.

Damn you're right. Been too long.
 

Durandal

Arcane
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New Eden
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
RayForce. The entire game is a suicide mission where you set out to destroy an evil AI that has taken over Earth and set out to destroy all humans, the remnants of which have escaped to space and built your ship. As you fly into the Earth's core, you find that the AI is rebuilding it from the inside out to be a massive artificial fortress inhabited by perfect clone-humans. The final stage has you witness the interior of the Earth core being covered in endless gray buildings and skyscrapers that are meant as living quarters for these clone-humans. Nonetheless, you destroy the AI core, destroying with it the entire Earth and you with it. The ending makes it fairly ambiguous whether the human remnants even survived the AI forces' onslaught during the start of your mission.

The sequel, RayStorm, is a bit of a bigger downer, where just like in the first game you fly into the core of the planet that has been waging war on yours. You blow up its core defense system and manage to fly out in time, except the sheer force of the explosion knocks the planet out of its orbit and sends it flying into a nearby gas planet, causing the full extinction of its population of 78 billion while peppy French pop music plays in the background.
 

Reinhardt

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Sep 4, 2015
Messages
29,226
Conquest ending in second Neptunia, especially considering overall game and series tone. It was... unexpected, to say the least...
 

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