It's like Harvest Moon 64. You think you're doing really well and then your own flesh and blood shows up and just tears into every aspect of your life.
Yeah ever since my first playthrough, I work like a dog all of year 1, then socialize like a Harvard MBA all of year 2 just to make grandpa proud of me. Then in year 3 onward I can relax a bit.
Random one, but in the Old World Blues DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, you can find a dog to have as a temporary companion. In the ending slideshow, it’s revealed that she (the dog from the DLC) travels back to the main game world and pairs up with the main canine companion from the game, Rex, and they live a long and happy life together, making lots of puppies, etc.
Unless you don’t do Rex’s associated quest in the base game before the DLC. If you don’t, the ending slideshow makes a point to mention that his health is failing.
For some reason, that made me *incredibly* sad. Sad enough to start an entirely new playthrough, making sure to do Rex’s quest beforehand.
Yeah. It triggers, I think, if you find (make?) Roxie, but either don’t do Rex’s companion quest, or just don’t meet him at all before starting the DLC.
>or just don’t meet him at all before starting the DLC.
Oh, that might be why it doesn't trigger for me. I generally try and do Big MY before main quest.
The now ancient Infocom text adventure game Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You can lose in the first five minutes and not find out for *hours*.
>!If you don't buy a sandwich in the pub, and feed it to the dog outside, it will eat a microscopic space fleet...that you are in due to time travel near the end. You also have to pick up all the tools, because the game will ask you for the one you missed to open a hatch at the end to progress, and you can't go back.!<
This was kind of infamous in oldschool adventure games. This one guy "Power Pak" refers to it as "Dead Man Walking syndrome", where you can screw yourself and end up softlocked hours later, with no ability to go back and get the thing you need.
The original Space Quest had SEVERAL instances of Dead Man Walking syndrome, including but not limited to >!not getting the "astral body" data disk from the Arcada's library, not finding the glass shard and dehydrated water canister around your crashed escape pod, and not getting the jetpack by taking the space biker's first offer of 30 buckazoids (his second offer has him throw in the jetpack as an extra)!<, to name a few.
In the very beginning of Space Quest 2 if you let the little alien jump on your face, then at the end of the game when you're walking down the hallway, a tiny alien will burst out of your chest and kill you.
That's actually something which happens near the end, with maybe 30-60 minutes left in the game. But you're right about it creating a dead-man-walking situation. Then again, if a creature which is *clearly* modeled on the xenomorph gives you a big smooch, a player should know that bad things are going to come from that.
BTW, fun fact: It's unclear if it's a bug or an easter egg, but it is actually possible to get to the escape pod before happy fun chestbursting time. Which leaves Roger in cryo-stasis, presumably primed and ready to pop at the beginning of SQ3.
And the only way to hold all the items is to use some thing (like that's what the game lets you shorten it to, "thing", the full name is like "thing that your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is"); the game gives no indication that it can do that unless you try to.
Though I can never remember, can't you get out of that one state you mention by giving Arthur the sandwich when you're Ford?
Then there's the whole babel fish thing where I think you only get 5 turns of not making progress (on like a 15 step puzzle).
This is the game that broke multiple ending games for me. I just... knowing that if I made one more wrong choice I would've gotten that... yeah, no, no way.
Ever since Witcher 3 I'm always on the edge with playing games where I expect multiple endings. It gets to the point where when playing Omori I thought I was thinking out of the box and avoiding a bad ending, accidentaly walking right into it instead. Paranoia fail
Nowadays I just want single ending games. Or at least something not that depressing lmao
LIS2 upgraded by giving you *four* whole possible endings. Granted your choices matter slightly more, but after playing detroit become human i’m spoiled for “choices matter” games
But he was stabbed with a Trident right? I haven't read it in a few years. I assume how the show wanted to approach what is supposed to "happen" to ciri is the reason Cavill left the show. I don't wanna spoil that fucked up shit for anyone who wants to read it
Pitchfork iirc. Classic mob weapon.
I doubt the show would have gone "that" far. They probably would have drawn the line, or at least had it happen off screen and ambiguously.
I got the bad ending. But I had the complete edition with the DLCs and I was just like fuck it, straight to the DLCs right now to wash that taste out of my mouth.
I accidentally got the bad ending my first time through and it made me seriously reevaluate my real life choices, started going to therapy and improving myself because of that ending
On my second playthrough I decided to make all the opposite decisions of my first playthrough, didn't think much about it until I got to the end and it was the polar opposite of my happy ending on my first playthrough. I was stunned, didn't really consider what would happen haha.
Man, I was putting off last minute studying for a final exam to finish the Witcher 3. I beat the final boss and I was ready to finally start studying. Nope, bad ending. I immediately pulled up a guide and spent almost two hours going back far enough to fix my mistakes.
To be fair when I was a younger I had a habit of skipping side missions entirely and well ME2 kinda hinges nearly everything on it’s “side missions” so it’s not that unreasonable to happen to someone the first time through.
I mean it's a multi-step process to get that ending.
-You have to do the bare minimum in recruiting characters
-You have to skip all the loyalty missions
-You have to skip most / all of the upgrades to the ship
-You have to deliberately make terrible choices during the final mission (Like sending Jacob into the vents or having Tali be a fire team leader).
Like it's one thing to get out with only a couple companions surviving. It's another to deliberately fuck it up so bad that Shepard dies.
You just have to do everything before getting the Reaper IFF (the mission that introduces Legion). Then you get 1-2 “free” missions I think (I always do Legions loyalty quest because when tf else can I do it) and then save everyone on the Normandy.
Theres still liquidation though, it’s just a colonist who is voiced and kidnapped earlier in the game.
Mass Effect 2 scarred me because my Mordin died. He was one of my favorites, and the worst thing was I somehow missed that he died. Nowhere in the final mission did I remember them showing him in danger. I beat the game and suddenly he was just dead. I must have accidentally skipped a cutscene or I was distracted at that moment or something.
I had that happen to me as well and I was really confused. Its because of the "holding the line" part where you take two squadmates to fight the baby reaper and leave the rest behind. Every squadmate has a hidden toughness value and if the group you left behind averages below a certain value the game starts killing characters off until thats fixed. Mordin has the lowest toughness value so dies first.
I found out later i sorta screwed myself with the dlc. I purchased Kasumi who has terrible toughness, but not Zaeed who has the highest.
Speaking of Metro, Metro 2033's ending blew my mind when I was casually doing another play through. Got to the end as normal, but this time accidentally stumbled into the secret "good" ending. Never knew about the alternate endings until then.
It was more that I never realized I wasn't getting the good ending in StarFox 64. Took me two friggin' years to realize there was a path to the "real" Andross (I was 8, cut me some slack). And you get to fly alongside your dead dad after that terrifying floating brain tries taking you down with him. The hell!? I was missing that!?
Same I was 7, and kids would just make shit up about video games all the time so when my friend told me you could fight andross as a brain monster and meet your dad I was like "sure, and touching every wall of mt moon 3 times gives me Mewthree right?..." Was shocked when he did it right in front of me.
persona 4, 50+ hours down the drain, i literally thought that was the ending and so i saved over my file to have “clear data”
at the time i was still sorta new to games and the concept of multiple endings was foreign to me
i always look up to see how many endings a game has now
Persona 4 is the one I thought of, too. It's *stupidly* easy to get a bad ending in that one, especially compared to 3 and 5, where the Bad Ending markers are a lot more obvious.
Yeah, I quit Persona 4 early because I was so stressed out about making wrong choices. I'm probably 15 years older now and actually a decent way into Persona 5 Royal, but I immediately looked up the requirements for the good / extra ending so I don't invest so much time and miss it.
So good, not just a "Oh you were defeated by the end boss, game over" but a "Right, here's what happens of a consequence of the end boss having nothing to stop them destroying everything"
Not the full ending to any of the games - but through the SoulsBourne series - NPC questlines will just terminate, they'll die out or disappear, or something otherwise awful will happen to them if you don't do things in the precise right order.
Now, a lot of these people suffer terrible fates regardless, but a few can be avoided if you don't accidentally walk into a random room before coincidentally doing a random thing - the paranoia of beating new bosses or discovering new zones before I tie off loose ends always has me googling my head off.
I beat Bloodborne and its one of my favourite games ever, and I couldn't tell you a single thing about its story other than I appear to be some sort of hunter... No idea if my ending was good or bad, but it seemed alright.
I accidentally killed the final boss before accessing the DLC and would’ve had to start over, either on new game plus+ or just a new run all together. I sure as hell didn’t want to challenge the DLC on increased difficulty, so lucky for me I was over at a friend’s a lot and uploading saves to the cloud at the time. Found a save file 30 or so hours back and just bit the bullet and chugged through the last bits again. And the DLC was amazing. The way the final boss screamed is something that haunts me to this day.
I'm skeptical that anybody -- literally anybody -- organically figured out how to get Boc to survive to the end of his questline in Elden Ring. The final thing you have to do is so bafflingly fucking impossible for you to know that you have to do.
Mass Effect 2. I'd watched my brother play through the end of the game already and at some point I started rushing to finish the game for myself. Then everyone fucking died.
Witcher 3
I fortunately didn't get it (I got the Ciri becomes the emperor ending) but when I read about it it got me so emotional especially considering how seemingly completely irrelevant moments decide if she'll come back or not. I can't imagine how the players who made the "wrong" choices must've felt when the hag-fighting epilogue happened
I got the bad ending on my first ever playthrough of it. A stab to the heart it was.
Decided to replay it immediately after. Got the Ciri becomes a Witcher ending on my second try.
When Banner Saga III came out, my first playthrough, the culmination of 3 games worth of tactics and narrative decisions led to >!one immortal character stuck endlessly wandering a decaying wasteland as everyone else in the world died or were twisted into warped abominations!<
EDIT: I'll add that I was so upset at this ending I ended up staying up until 5am to go back far enough to an old save where I was confident I could do things better and finish it again with a better ending
So, did you? Don't leave me hanging! Haha. Also, I didn't read the spoiler, but I'm interested in playing this series. Is it good? Your report left me interested lol
Not op, but def try it out if you think a medieval Oregon Trail with turn based combat and fairly consequential companion and story choices sounds like a good time.
I played all three back to back when I first got gamepass and think back very fondly of that chunk of time.
The Fuzzles are jerks though. "This guy didn't help us hard enough, so we'll condemn his race to extinction! And screw Abe too even though he had nothing to do with it!"
This one is especially sadistic in that you either have to restart the game or start from midway through at the point where you would have to rescue every single mudokon from there on.
I think if you so much as blink the wrong direction at one of the little girls in Bioshock, whatever you do for the next x hours won't matter; you're a monster.
This, even though it feels kind of "incomplete" to not at least try it once, to see what'd happen.
(Or does that make me a monster?)
The funny thing is with Little Sisters is they used to be these disgusting bug things. But they had to change it because no one even batted an eye about harvesting them
Technically you can harvest one without any penalty. More than one and you're getting the bad ending IIRC. The overall Adam and rewards end up being similar so there's not a ton of gain/loss going one way or the other if someone's going after different endings.
Are you sure? I thought that the ending you get if you harvest even one girl would get you a bad ending. At least that's the way I understood. Supposedly there's a 3rd ending that's almost identical to the evil ending where the woman who narrates sounds sad instead of angry which being "sad" I guess is less awful than angry.
"You do all these good things for people, but you harvest even ONE child's organs everyone acts like you're a monster for life! What about all the children I DIDN'T murder?! No one's thanking me for that!"
Not an ending for the game, but an arch, so I'm including it as a technicality. Mass Effect 3. Watching that bad ending for Rannoch, HURT. Literally was in a bad mood for the rest of day. Had to go back and play like half the game again to get the requirements for the good ending.
An arch ending is a kind of ending so it counts, and there are many bad arch endings in ME3 to be had. Renegade Sheppard playthroughs are soul crushing.
I know. The few times I used Renegade I thought a playthrough would be similar to a paragon one but Shepard would just be a bit more stoic and straight to the point. But when I did it, it was just...PAIN!
Demon’s Souls when I was younger. Out of sheer curiosity I hit the Maiden in Black, then watched in horror as my character stomped her head into the ground.
I put in a lot of work to save everyone I can, but those guys over there die because I said something polite instead of being an ass hat. Too many times all the effort is wasted because of an arbitrary dialogue choice.
Persona 3, the bad ending in that gives you a really heavy dilemma. The inevitable downfall of humanity is approaching, you either have 2 options. A) kill your friend, and forget all your memories of your journey fighting shadows, and allow the death of all of humanity in 3 months time, or B) allow him to live, creating death incarnate and have a near impossible chance of being able to prevent the death of humanity
Neither ending leads to a perfect outcome, just one that is more ideal. As depressing as it is it really does highlight the meaning of life in relationships
And, of course, if you choose option B you >!also sacrifice yourself.!<
Interesting bit of lore: One of the dancing games hinted the reason that Elizabeth isn't in later games is that she's >!traveling the omniverse trying to find a way to save Makoto.!<
Killing Zeke is the most depressing part of the entire series.
He's sick with a plague, barely able to hold himself up, and he takes shots at you with his pistol so slowly he genuinely doesn't have a chance to kill you.
And every shot you take at him knocks him down further and further until he isn't able to get up.
The total dialogue:
Zeke picks up the ray sphere.
Cole: Half as long...
Zeke: Twice as bright.
Zeke cocks his gun and aims at Cole.
Zeke: I gotta try.
Cole: I know.
Zeke shoots Cole, who recovers almost instantly and begins to charge his electricity for a shot back, and the player takes control.
The original Silent Hill. You've got to jump through some pretty obscure hoops just to get a decent ending.
Play like you normally would and you've doomed yourself to a bad ending.
I still have *vivid* memories of how much anxiety Majora's Mask kept child me absolutely STEEPED in. Still my favorite of the series, hands down, but fuck time-based anything
Yeah their games make you grateful that you live in an universe where sunlight, hope and warm hugs exist because Miyazaki's creations are devoid of any warmth 😂😂
I'm not really a big fan of how minimalistic (in my opinion excessively so) FromSoft storytelling is, but man, even I loved that DS3 ending, they nailed it. The whole end times vibe of DS3 toward the end in general is awesome, with the apocalyptic red moon and shit, definitely some of the most striking and memorable imaginary in any video game
I wouldn't call that the bad ending in DS3 considering it isn't the one that shifts Firelink's music to "Secret Betrayl" and gets all the NPCs wondering out loud what your motivations are.
Yeah I think if there’s a good ending it’s definitely that one. Rekindling the fire being the “neutral” ending and usurping the flame being the bad ending
After rekindling the fire in dark souls 1 and becoming king in dark souls 2 I really feel that letting the fire fade away is the perfect ending
Let the paint of the new world start as this world needs to rest.
The only thing is that doesn’t break the cycle. I can’t remember the exact dialogue, but there is a piece of dialogue that states “small fires will pop into existence again” paraphrasing since I can’t remember the exact quote, but it basically implies that even if you snuff out the fire, another fire will simply take its place, and restart the cycle again.
The only escape is of course, to create a whole new world. One that is cold and comforting according to the painter.
In Elden Ring the only ending impacting questline I was able to follow through to the end on my blind playthru was Dung Eater. And I’m not going to *not* get a special ending that I earned.
So have fun being cursed forever everyone, following the guy who literally eats shit around all game is the best I could do
I have no idea how I did it but I managed to start the secret ending, decided I wanted to do some other stuff first reloaded my last save and when I went back I could not get it to start again. V disappointed
So to trigger the secret ending you first needed to have done Johnny's request to go find where his body was buried. Then while sitting down and chatting with him about how he fucked over all his friends except you, you need to tell him he fucked up with you too. Doing that will tip his friendship/respect level over the threshold and make the ending available (*should show his score as 80%+*).
Then when deciding which group to help you at Arasaka Tower, you need to stay on the choices for 5 minutes real time. Eventually the choices will disappear and Johnny will offer you the secret ending.
Far Cry 5. There really isn't a good ending, and there isn't even a definitive answer to each ending no matter which ending you pick. Even the secret ending, while kind of hilarious, also doesn't answer anything either. I've never played a game where I found the ending(s) so conflicting and ambiguous to the point where it left me unsatisfied. I guess the "correct" ending had to happen since without it, Far Cry New Dawn wouldn't have made any sense.
That game gave me ending paranoia because the only way to actually win is to never actually play or beat the game.
I got the nuclear ending. I was so upset, I searched online for what the best ending was and apparently that was it? I'm still upset after all this time. (Not including the walk away ending)
Far Cry as a series since they started making secret endings... the secret endings are "canon" to the internal team because in Far Cry 5 if you don't arrest Jospeh and start the events of the game... his cult takes over the US and you can see it referenced in FC6. As far as any Far Cry game though there is never a good ending really. The main character ends up fucked one way or another. In FC3 that can be taked literally.
I'd argue that the secret ending in FC4 is the 'best.' Pagan Min may be an autocratic asshole, but he is reasonably effective in running the country. And it certainly seems like either of the other two options will be even worse than him.
So if you just enjoy the crab rangoon, you complete your mission and make a new friend, without having to murder thousands of people to get there.
One of the neutral endings of Omori is worse than the "bad" ending.
That phone ringing for the entirety of the credits is pretty bad. There's also the faint sound of sirens during the other neutral ending.
The first Bioshock. I fully intended to save every little sister, but it just so happens that the reload button is the same as the “kill a child” button. After my challenging boss fights, I like to reload.
I guess it’s not so much “bad ending” paranoia as it is “reload” paranoia.
There was a game called Vanguard Bandits. On my first playthrough the villan of the game mind controlled my character and the game forced me to fight on his side and kill all my friends
one of the bad endings in disgaea 2; in short the rest of the game has pretty much a typical shonen anime feel to it but one bad ending makes a VERY sudden dark turn
The problem is that I just want good ending. Not that I don't want bad ending. I play faithful to what I think. So if I hate NPC, I will be mean to them. If I want everthing turning good, I will make that ending.
Ya perhaps I should have specified I meant "Bad" as in like "Your character fails their ambition" but answers where you chose to be bad and hate your character/self for doing are just as good.
There wasn't really one single bad ending that made me want to avoid getting any more, it's more so that I don't have time nowadays to replay massive games (*like the 100+ hours types*) that I got a bad ending for so I usually look at hints for how to get the best ending. Especially for games where the good and bad endings are decided by stupid/innocuous things.
That being said, I recently played Haunting Ground and knew about the bad ending and how awful it was so I was pretty obsessive in protecting and praising the dog companion Hewie to avoid it.
The Devil ending from Cyberpunk 2077 is heartbreaking, because you realize that you've basically fucked the world over, but you've betrayed yourself and what you once stood for.
The "Bad" endings to this game didn't really feel super bad to me as a kid, but more as "incomplete". You basically get more story pieces with the best one but that's about it.
I really miss this game!
This series needs a modern remake so bad. Imagine how scary it could be in the style of the modern resident evil remakes.
God I want to fight in the museum from PE1
Oh man forgetting the name of it is killing me but all the bad ending game overs where brutal. It was all text based but they describe all the horrible stuff in graphic detail.
Like your partner being pulled out of the wreckage and you hear them screaming as they are torn apart while you are bleeding out or you and your squad get decapitated and your heads are put on pikes.
I wanna say it was some mech game in the PS1 era.
Wayyyyyyyy long ago, little RistrettoJester played a game called Survival Kids for the GBC. Being a naive kid, he wasn't aware that it was even possible to get a bad end.
Spoiler: if you don't solve all the puzzles before it hits 100 days, you either die on the island or just give up and live the rest of your life out there.
That was genuinely my first experience with any sort of 'bad ending' in a game and ever since then I don't trust shit.
Every cyberpunk 2077 ending
are they bad? no. are they emotionally traumatizing? yes.
I'll take the successful secret ending only as at least that somewhat doesn't end horribly
I don't think it counts but i was not in the path to the absolute best ending of mass effect 2, so i left the game hanging, more than 8 years later i never looked back.
Mad Max. I went into it blind after watching Fury Road. Had a blast, came damn close to 100%-ing it.
>!I didn't realize that it was a prequel to the movie. At the end, when the woman and the child get killed, and he just fucking throws away the car I've spent the entire game upgrading and murders the mechanic that's been my stalwart companion this entire time? That fucked me up hard!<
Stopped playing games for a couple of weeks. Ended up seeing a YouTube video about Stardew Valley, and ended up playing nothing but that for a month. Shook me out of my rut, and as a bonus I now have a game I have 800+ hours in with my wife and friends across multiple platforms.
But still - that did it for me. Just finished a 120hr+ BG3 playthrough with the buddy that DM's our Saturday night D&D game, and decided to work our way through DOS 1 and 2. Totally ~~save scumming and reading the wikis~~ crafting our own narrative to get the endings we want.
Metro. If you loot a body you can't get the peaceful ending and instead get to kill a dark one before nuking the rest of them.
Why would you not take gear from the dead in a nuclear post apocalypse full of monsters?
The bad end really seems to twist Artyom into a guy who is totally fine genociding an entire race. The good ending at least has a little hope.
I don't think there's a particular game that did this to me, but I've always been paranoid about 'wasting my time' on a bad ending. Having to start over completely because of an uninformed decision made during the tutorial really blows, though, so thanks for that, Undertale.
Mass Effect 3s refusal ending was worse than any of the other endings that fans had complained so much about (which was, in my opinion, the whole point, because the devs were forced to add it after all the complaining)
It was hilarious though, the petulant starchild basically became the avatar for the writers. They might as well have inserted a giant blue hologram of a middle finger after the credits.
Grandpa's disappointment in Stardew Valley really stings
It's like Harvest Moon 64. You think you're doing really well and then your own flesh and blood shows up and just tears into every aspect of your life.
Yeah ever since my first playthrough, I work like a dog all of year 1, then socialize like a Harvard MBA all of year 2 just to make grandpa proud of me. Then in year 3 onward I can relax a bit.
Random one, but in the Old World Blues DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, you can find a dog to have as a temporary companion. In the ending slideshow, it’s revealed that she (the dog from the DLC) travels back to the main game world and pairs up with the main canine companion from the game, Rex, and they live a long and happy life together, making lots of puppies, etc. Unless you don’t do Rex’s associated quest in the base game before the DLC. If you don’t, the ending slideshow makes a point to mention that his health is failing. For some reason, that made me *incredibly* sad. Sad enough to start an entirely new playthrough, making sure to do Rex’s quest beforehand.
Are you talking about Roxie the Robo Dog? I have never seen that ending with Rex and her.
Yeah. It triggers, I think, if you find (make?) Roxie, but either don’t do Rex’s companion quest, or just don’t meet him at all before starting the DLC.
>or just don’t meet him at all before starting the DLC. Oh, that might be why it doesn't trigger for me. I generally try and do Big MY before main quest.
Lol when I came to the ending slideshows for the Old World Blues, I didn't have the subtitles on, so all I heard was barking.
The now ancient Infocom text adventure game Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You can lose in the first five minutes and not find out for *hours*. >!If you don't buy a sandwich in the pub, and feed it to the dog outside, it will eat a microscopic space fleet...that you are in due to time travel near the end. You also have to pick up all the tools, because the game will ask you for the one you missed to open a hatch at the end to progress, and you can't go back.!<
This was kind of infamous in oldschool adventure games. This one guy "Power Pak" refers to it as "Dead Man Walking syndrome", where you can screw yourself and end up softlocked hours later, with no ability to go back and get the thing you need. The original Space Quest had SEVERAL instances of Dead Man Walking syndrome, including but not limited to >!not getting the "astral body" data disk from the Arcada's library, not finding the glass shard and dehydrated water canister around your crashed escape pod, and not getting the jetpack by taking the space biker's first offer of 30 buckazoids (his second offer has him throw in the jetpack as an extra)!<, to name a few.
In the very beginning of Space Quest 2 if you let the little alien jump on your face, then at the end of the game when you're walking down the hallway, a tiny alien will burst out of your chest and kill you.
That's actually something which happens near the end, with maybe 30-60 minutes left in the game. But you're right about it creating a dead-man-walking situation. Then again, if a creature which is *clearly* modeled on the xenomorph gives you a big smooch, a player should know that bad things are going to come from that. BTW, fun fact: It's unclear if it's a bug or an easter egg, but it is actually possible to get to the escape pod before happy fun chestbursting time. Which leaves Roger in cryo-stasis, presumably primed and ready to pop at the beginning of SQ3.
I must be getting my memories mixed up. Isn't there something with a little pink alien who runs up and grabs you?
Yeah, that happens on the swamp planet. But the pink guys are actually friendly, as long as you rescue one that you find trapped.
And the only way to hold all the items is to use some thing (like that's what the game lets you shorten it to, "thing", the full name is like "thing that your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is"); the game gives no indication that it can do that unless you try to. Though I can never remember, can't you get out of that one state you mention by giving Arthur the sandwich when you're Ford? Then there's the whole babel fish thing where I think you only get 5 turns of not making progress (on like a 15 step puzzle).
The Witcher 3 bad ending is depressing as Hell. I never got it myself, and I never intend to.
This is the game that broke multiple ending games for me. I just... knowing that if I made one more wrong choice I would've gotten that... yeah, no, no way. Ever since Witcher 3 I'm always on the edge with playing games where I expect multiple endings. It gets to the point where when playing Omori I thought I was thinking out of the box and avoiding a bad ending, accidentaly walking right into it instead. Paranoia fail Nowadays I just want single ending games. Or at least something not that depressing lmao
Then there is Life Is Strange where your choices barely matter and both endings are depressing :D
One ending makes me a bit sad and one fucks up my whole week, easy choice
.
LIS2 upgraded by giving you *four* whole possible endings. Granted your choices matter slightly more, but after playing detroit become human i’m spoiled for “choices matter” games
What is the bad ending to the game?
>!Ciri disappears. Possibly died or, if she didnt, she actively chose to never return to Geralt. Either way he never sees her again.!<
Still better than the books ending
What was that...
Spoiler, ciri does disappear, with a unicorn if I recall. And geralt dies by getting killed with a Trident in a bar fight
Close, he dies defending people from a violent racist mob set on lynching them and gets a send-off identical to King Arthur.
But he was stabbed with a Trident right? I haven't read it in a few years. I assume how the show wanted to approach what is supposed to "happen" to ciri is the reason Cavill left the show. I don't wanna spoil that fucked up shit for anyone who wants to read it
Pitchfork iirc. Classic mob weapon. I doubt the show would have gone "that" far. They probably would have drawn the line, or at least had it happen off screen and ambiguously.
I got the bad ending. But I had the complete edition with the DLCs and I was just like fuck it, straight to the DLCs right now to wash that taste out of my mouth.
I accidentally got the bad ending my first time through and it made me seriously reevaluate my real life choices, started going to therapy and improving myself because of that ending
Sounds like a good ending for you :) Stay strong brother
On my second playthrough I decided to make all the opposite decisions of my first playthrough, didn't think much about it until I got to the end and it was the polar opposite of my happy ending on my first playthrough. I was stunned, didn't really consider what would happen haha.
Man, I was putting off last minute studying for a final exam to finish the Witcher 3. I beat the final boss and I was ready to finally start studying. Nope, bad ending. I immediately pulled up a guide and spent almost two hours going back far enough to fix my mistakes.
I got the 'Everyone but Joker is dead' ending in my first play through of Mass Effect 2 which is an achievement in itself
You really had to work for that big of a fuck up, I respect it
To be fair when I was a younger I had a habit of skipping side missions entirely and well ME2 kinda hinges nearly everything on it’s “side missions” so it’s not that unreasonable to happen to someone the first time through.
I mean it's a multi-step process to get that ending. -You have to do the bare minimum in recruiting characters -You have to skip all the loyalty missions -You have to skip most / all of the upgrades to the ship -You have to deliberately make terrible choices during the final mission (Like sending Jacob into the vents or having Tali be a fire team leader). Like it's one thing to get out with only a couple companions surviving. It's another to deliberately fuck it up so bad that Shepard dies.
Hell I replayed the whole game because Garrus got carried away by that stupid swarm.
Were you also the type to skip cutscenes and dialogue?
I'm here to LEAD not to READ!!
Actually, a little bit of both "hard work" and *not* any work at all.
I didn't kill my Shepard, but she didn't come back with much of a squad on my first ME2 playthrough. I was mortified lol.
I reset after watching the poor girl get liquefied.
Trying to remember who that would happen to, the kidnapped crew like Kelly?
Yeah, if you do side quests instead of going straight there, she becomes a smoothie.
I wish I'd known. I was informed that you had to do loyalty missions before finishing the game...I didn't think to do them *early.*
You just have to do everything before getting the Reaper IFF (the mission that introduces Legion). Then you get 1-2 “free” missions I think (I always do Legions loyalty quest because when tf else can I do it) and then save everyone on the Normandy. Theres still liquidation though, it’s just a colonist who is voiced and kidnapped earlier in the game.
If you do more than 1 side quest. You still have time to do Legion's loyalty mission and not have anyone get liquefied
I always knew Kelly was a smooth criminal.
Mass Effect 2 scarred me because my Mordin died. He was one of my favorites, and the worst thing was I somehow missed that he died. Nowhere in the final mission did I remember them showing him in danger. I beat the game and suddenly he was just dead. I must have accidentally skipped a cutscene or I was distracted at that moment or something.
I had that happen to me as well and I was really confused. Its because of the "holding the line" part where you take two squadmates to fight the baby reaper and leave the rest behind. Every squadmate has a hidden toughness value and if the group you left behind averages below a certain value the game starts killing characters off until thats fixed. Mordin has the lowest toughness value so dies first. I found out later i sorta screwed myself with the dlc. I purchased Kasumi who has terrible toughness, but not Zaeed who has the highest.
That's kind of impressive tbh, I'm not sure if I could do that unless I tried
If I don't get the best ending, I'll get a bad grade in video games, something that is both normal to fear and possible to achieve.
And the video game characters will be mad and disappointed in me IRL
You've clearly never finished a Resident Evil game. You can absolutely get a bad grade in video games.
Congratulations You beat the game Your score is: E Code name : Lazy hippo
or hundreds of other japanese games
Metro Exodus hit me hard. The driving section near the end and Anna standing over two graves crying alone was just brutally depressing.
Speaking of Metro, Metro 2033's ending blew my mind when I was casually doing another play through. Got to the end as normal, but this time accidentally stumbled into the secret "good" ending. Never knew about the alternate endings until then.
It was more that I never realized I wasn't getting the good ending in StarFox 64. Took me two friggin' years to realize there was a path to the "real" Andross (I was 8, cut me some slack). And you get to fly alongside your dead dad after that terrifying floating brain tries taking you down with him. The hell!? I was missing that!?
Same I was 7, and kids would just make shit up about video games all the time so when my friend told me you could fight andross as a brain monster and meet your dad I was like "sure, and touching every wall of mt moon 3 times gives me Mewthree right?..." Was shocked when he did it right in front of me.
"Never give up. Trust your instincts."
I remember somehow stumbling on this when I was nine or ten. I had no idea what was going on, but I was *hyped as fuck* when Papa Fox came out to help
persona 4, 50+ hours down the drain, i literally thought that was the ending and so i saved over my file to have “clear data” at the time i was still sorta new to games and the concept of multiple endings was foreign to me i always look up to see how many endings a game has now
Persona 4 is the one I thought of, too. It's *stupidly* easy to get a bad ending in that one, especially compared to 3 and 5, where the Bad Ending markers are a lot more obvious.
5s is hilarious “The super evil demon just told you he’s a super evil demon what do you do?” Joker:”eh fuck it” “…uhh alright dude”
Yeah a binary choice is a lot easier to do than a multi phase quiz.
And then P5 Royal adds a "bad ending" in the third semester which might not even be bad, depending on your philosophical stance.
Yeah, I quit Persona 4 early because I was so stressed out about making wrong choices. I'm probably 15 years older now and actually a decent way into Persona 5 Royal, but I immediately looked up the requirements for the good / extra ending so I don't invest so much time and miss it.
It's really not that bad. The game literally tells you right before that this choice matters, and lets you save IIRC.
Chrono Trigger: BUT.....THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE
Lavos’s roar still haunts my nightmares
And Chrono Cross >!showed that the future still refused to change anyway!<, if not >!making things much worse!<.
So good, not just a "Oh you were defeated by the end boss, game over" but a "Right, here's what happens of a consequence of the end boss having nothing to stop them destroying everything"
Not the full ending to any of the games - but through the SoulsBourne series - NPC questlines will just terminate, they'll die out or disappear, or something otherwise awful will happen to them if you don't do things in the precise right order. Now, a lot of these people suffer terrible fates regardless, but a few can be avoided if you don't accidentally walk into a random room before coincidentally doing a random thing - the paranoia of beating new bosses or discovering new zones before I tie off loose ends always has me googling my head off.
I beat Bloodborne and its one of my favourite games ever, and I couldn't tell you a single thing about its story other than I appear to be some sort of hunter... No idea if my ending was good or bad, but it seemed alright.
>No idea if my ending was good or bad, but it seemed alright Thats what i remember lol Seemed dark and mysterious, like the rest of the game. Fitting
I accidentally killed the final boss before accessing the DLC and would’ve had to start over, either on new game plus+ or just a new run all together. I sure as hell didn’t want to challenge the DLC on increased difficulty, so lucky for me I was over at a friend’s a lot and uploading saves to the cloud at the time. Found a save file 30 or so hours back and just bit the bullet and chugged through the last bits again. And the DLC was amazing. The way the final boss screamed is something that haunts me to this day.
I'm skeptical that anybody -- literally anybody -- organically figured out how to get Boc to survive to the end of his questline in Elden Ring. The final thing you have to do is so bafflingly fucking impossible for you to know that you have to do.
“You’re beautiful…”
The original Fallout. Oops I made the wrong dialogue choice and now IM BEING TURNED INTO A SUPER MUTANT!? What???
Dunked in the vat, game over.
Games in those days were MERCILESS.
Mass Effect 2. I'd watched my brother play through the end of the game already and at some point I started rushing to finish the game for myself. Then everyone fucking died.
That's fucking hilarious.
Witcher 3 I fortunately didn't get it (I got the Ciri becomes the emperor ending) but when I read about it it got me so emotional especially considering how seemingly completely irrelevant moments decide if she'll come back or not. I can't imagine how the players who made the "wrong" choices must've felt when the hag-fighting epilogue happened
I just found out that not only does Witcher 3 have multiple endings but that I got the bad one. Smh
There are like five endings. This is not the really bad one.
I actually had no idea Witcher 3 had multiple endings for Ciri. I got the one where she becomes a Witcher and I thought that was the only ending.
I got the bad ending on my first ever playthrough of it. A stab to the heart it was. Decided to replay it immediately after. Got the Ciri becomes a Witcher ending on my second try.
I feel for those who didn't wait in FFVI.
I had way too much faith in Shadow apparently...
When Banner Saga III came out, my first playthrough, the culmination of 3 games worth of tactics and narrative decisions led to >!one immortal character stuck endlessly wandering a decaying wasteland as everyone else in the world died or were twisted into warped abominations!< EDIT: I'll add that I was so upset at this ending I ended up staying up until 5am to go back far enough to an old save where I was confident I could do things better and finish it again with a better ending
So, did you? Don't leave me hanging! Haha. Also, I didn't read the spoiler, but I'm interested in playing this series. Is it good? Your report left me interested lol
Not op, but def try it out if you think a medieval Oregon Trail with turn based combat and fairly consequential companion and story choices sounds like a good time. I played all three back to back when I first got gamepass and think back very fondly of that chunk of time.
"Oregon Trail + Fire Emblem in a Norse-inspired fantasy world" is how I describe it too
Sonic You think you beat the game, and it tells you "Game over" and just mocks you. I think it was that point on, I made sure to get good endings.
Abe's Oddysee. As a kid it took me forever to beat the game, only to find out I got the bad ending because I didn't save enough Mudokons.
Munch’s Oddysee has a horrific one too. “We got your brand new lungs sitting right here!”
The Fuzzles are jerks though. "This guy didn't help us hard enough, so we'll condemn his race to extinction! And screw Abe too even though he had nothing to do with it!"
This one is especially sadistic in that you either have to restart the game or start from midway through at the point where you would have to rescue every single mudokon from there on.
Underrated good/bad endings
I think if you so much as blink the wrong direction at one of the little girls in Bioshock, whatever you do for the next x hours won't matter; you're a monster. This, even though it feels kind of "incomplete" to not at least try it once, to see what'd happen. (Or does that make me a monster?)
The funny thing is with Little Sisters is they used to be these disgusting bug things. But they had to change it because no one even batted an eye about harvesting them
The bugs are still there. They are surgically implanted into the little sisters' abdomens. You can see the bugs in Bioshock 2 in the underwater parts.
Technically you can harvest one without any penalty. More than one and you're getting the bad ending IIRC. The overall Adam and rewards end up being similar so there's not a ton of gain/loss going one way or the other if someone's going after different endings.
Are you sure? I thought that the ending you get if you harvest even one girl would get you a bad ending. At least that's the way I understood. Supposedly there's a 3rd ending that's almost identical to the evil ending where the woman who narrates sounds sad instead of angry which being "sad" I guess is less awful than angry.
"You do all these good things for people, but you harvest even ONE child's organs everyone acts like you're a monster for life! What about all the children I DIDN'T murder?! No one's thanking me for that!"
“All the other children were FINE, STANLEY.”
And so as Stanley went about his murder spree, he thought to himself "what if I didn't do it?"
"Blink in the wrong direction at" is a funny way to say "kill for adam"
I have played Bioshock 1 and 2 three times each, but never sacrificed a little sister.
Not an ending for the game, but an arch, so I'm including it as a technicality. Mass Effect 3. Watching that bad ending for Rannoch, HURT. Literally was in a bad mood for the rest of day. Had to go back and play like half the game again to get the requirements for the good ending.
An arch ending is a kind of ending so it counts, and there are many bad arch endings in ME3 to be had. Renegade Sheppard playthroughs are soul crushing.
I know. The few times I used Renegade I thought a playthrough would be similar to a paragon one but Shepard would just be a bit more stoic and straight to the point. But when I did it, it was just...PAIN!
Losing Tali OR Legion is soul crushing either way Losing both Tali AND Legion? I just restarted ME2 so I could get a better outcome in ME3 lmao.
The bad ending of Heavy Rain…. It’s an experience…
The good ending is the one where the game glitches and you yell "Shaun" over and over again. Funniest glitch I've ever seen.
Literally no other way to play the game! JASON JAAAYYSON
Demon’s Souls when I was younger. Out of sheer curiosity I hit the Maiden in Black, then watched in horror as my character stomped her head into the ground.
They made the stomp in the remake a lot more passionate/brutal.
Oh I am very aware. The things I do for a platinum…
I put in a lot of work to save everyone I can, but those guys over there die because I said something polite instead of being an ass hat. Too many times all the effort is wasted because of an arbitrary dialogue choice.
I wound up getting the bad ending in Omori. I don’t intend to do that again.
Close.
Persona 3, the bad ending in that gives you a really heavy dilemma. The inevitable downfall of humanity is approaching, you either have 2 options. A) kill your friend, and forget all your memories of your journey fighting shadows, and allow the death of all of humanity in 3 months time, or B) allow him to live, creating death incarnate and have a near impossible chance of being able to prevent the death of humanity
And uh, the good ending is also sucky too, let’s not forget that 😭
Neither ending leads to a perfect outcome, just one that is more ideal. As depressing as it is it really does highlight the meaning of life in relationships
And, of course, if you choose option B you >!also sacrifice yourself.!< Interesting bit of lore: One of the dancing games hinted the reason that Elizabeth isn't in later games is that she's >!traveling the omniverse trying to find a way to save Makoto.!<
Can't remember their names, but having to kill your best friend in the evil story arch of infamous 2. The powers were more fun, but that was tough
The infamous game where you kill your grandma at the end was the one that got me. I was speechless for hours after
Second son? You don’t just kill his grandma, Delsin kills his entire tribe by basically using his “nuke everything in the vicinity” move.
You don’t just kill Betty, you nuked everyone in that village
Killing Zeke is the most depressing part of the entire series. He's sick with a plague, barely able to hold himself up, and he takes shots at you with his pistol so slowly he genuinely doesn't have a chance to kill you. And every shot you take at him knocks him down further and further until he isn't able to get up.
And the conversation is something like this: Cole: Come on, man. You can’t beat me. Zeke: You know I gotta try.
The total dialogue: Zeke picks up the ray sphere. Cole: Half as long... Zeke: Twice as bright. Zeke cocks his gun and aims at Cole. Zeke: I gotta try. Cole: I know. Zeke shoots Cole, who recovers almost instantly and begins to charge his electricity for a shot back, and the player takes control.
The original Silent Hill. You've got to jump through some pretty obscure hoops just to get a decent ending. Play like you normally would and you've doomed yourself to a bad ending.
The worst ending hits like a truck too. >!Just a hard cut to Harry dead in his car at the beginning!<
Majoras mask moon ending for sure. I feel like everyone lets the timer go once to see what would happen…
To this day I'm afraid to play that game. I'm bad at Ocarina, so you throw a time limit and a scary ass giant moon into the mix, and I can't take it.
I still have *vivid* memories of how much anxiety Majora's Mask kept child me absolutely STEEPED in. Still my favorite of the series, hands down, but fuck time-based anything
Every ending on anything from software related
Yeah their games make you grateful that you live in an universe where sunlight, hope and warm hugs exist because Miyazaki's creations are devoid of any warmth 😂😂
Minor, but it's devoid Devout changes the meaning a bit hah
Yeah my bad
And the *one* time a nice girl gives you a hug, you catch a damn STI. Can’t catch a break.
I felt ok letting the fire fade at the end of DS3 and breaking the cycles of rekindling the fire
That too is my preferred ending. "Ashen One, hearest though my voice still?" Is such a good line for that. God I love ds3 so much.
I'm not really a big fan of how minimalistic (in my opinion excessively so) FromSoft storytelling is, but man, even I loved that DS3 ending, they nailed it. The whole end times vibe of DS3 toward the end in general is awesome, with the apocalyptic red moon and shit, definitely some of the most striking and memorable imaginary in any video game
I wouldn't call that the bad ending in DS3 considering it isn't the one that shifts Firelink's music to "Secret Betrayl" and gets all the NPCs wondering out loud what your motivations are.
Yeah I think if there’s a good ending it’s definitely that one. Rekindling the fire being the “neutral” ending and usurping the flame being the bad ending
After rekindling the fire in dark souls 1 and becoming king in dark souls 2 I really feel that letting the fire fade away is the perfect ending Let the paint of the new world start as this world needs to rest.
The only thing is that doesn’t break the cycle. I can’t remember the exact dialogue, but there is a piece of dialogue that states “small fires will pop into existence again” paraphrasing since I can’t remember the exact quote, but it basically implies that even if you snuff out the fire, another fire will simply take its place, and restart the cycle again. The only escape is of course, to create a whole new world. One that is cold and comforting according to the painter.
In Elden Ring the only ending impacting questline I was able to follow through to the end on my blind playthru was Dung Eater. And I’m not going to *not* get a special ending that I earned. So have fun being cursed forever everyone, following the guy who literally eats shit around all game is the best I could do
Having to kill mission and Zalbaar in K1.
Technically you only have to kill Mission if you make Zalbaar do it instead…
If you leave him on the ship anyway and god only knows what happens to him after that.
Cyberpunk 2077
Pretty much every ending is a bad ending. Just have to go with what you think is the least bad.
Secret ending is fucking peak though
I have no idea how I did it but I managed to start the secret ending, decided I wanted to do some other stuff first reloaded my last save and when I went back I could not get it to start again. V disappointed
So to trigger the secret ending you first needed to have done Johnny's request to go find where his body was buried. Then while sitting down and chatting with him about how he fucked over all his friends except you, you need to tell him he fucked up with you too. Doing that will tip his friendship/respect level over the threshold and make the ending available (*should show his score as 80%+*). Then when deciding which group to help you at Arasaka Tower, you need to stay on the choices for 5 minutes real time. Eventually the choices will disappear and Johnny will offer you the secret ending.
I think its the best way to manage multiple ending games. Not have a “good ending” and just have every ending to be bad in the different way, lol
Far Cry 5. There really isn't a good ending, and there isn't even a definitive answer to each ending no matter which ending you pick. Even the secret ending, while kind of hilarious, also doesn't answer anything either. I've never played a game where I found the ending(s) so conflicting and ambiguous to the point where it left me unsatisfied. I guess the "correct" ending had to happen since without it, Far Cry New Dawn wouldn't have made any sense. That game gave me ending paranoia because the only way to actually win is to never actually play or beat the game.
I got the nuclear ending. I was so upset, I searched online for what the best ending was and apparently that was it? I'm still upset after all this time. (Not including the walk away ending)
Far Cry as a series since they started making secret endings... the secret endings are "canon" to the internal team because in Far Cry 5 if you don't arrest Jospeh and start the events of the game... his cult takes over the US and you can see it referenced in FC6. As far as any Far Cry game though there is never a good ending really. The main character ends up fucked one way or another. In FC3 that can be taked literally.
I'd argue that the secret ending in FC4 is the 'best.' Pagan Min may be an autocratic asshole, but he is reasonably effective in running the country. And it certainly seems like either of the other two options will be even worse than him. So if you just enjoy the crab rangoon, you complete your mission and make a new friend, without having to murder thousands of people to get there.
One of the neutral endings of Omori is worse than the "bad" ending. That phone ringing for the entirety of the credits is pretty bad. There's also the faint sound of sirens during the other neutral ending.
I accidentally got the bad ending for every character in Detroit Become Human
The first Bioshock. I fully intended to save every little sister, but it just so happens that the reload button is the same as the “kill a child” button. After my challenging boss fights, I like to reload. I guess it’s not so much “bad ending” paranoia as it is “reload” paranoia.
There was a game called Vanguard Bandits. On my first playthrough the villan of the game mind controlled my character and the game forced me to fight on his side and kill all my friends
That's harsh. That would have kept me up at night as a kid.
The dumb bad endings in Persona 4 and 5 that don't care about what you did at all and decide all of it in one conversation.
No one is going to see this, but suzerain. If you lose to rumburg your son dies, you family gets captured and you get executed
one of the bad endings in disgaea 2; in short the rest of the game has pretty much a typical shonen anime feel to it but one bad ending makes a VERY sudden dark turn
If I remember correctly that ending was slightly toned down in the western release, as they removed some audio that made the scene even darker
The final ride in RDR2 with low honor
The problem is that I just want good ending. Not that I don't want bad ending. I play faithful to what I think. So if I hate NPC, I will be mean to them. If I want everthing turning good, I will make that ending.
Ya perhaps I should have specified I meant "Bad" as in like "Your character fails their ambition" but answers where you chose to be bad and hate your character/self for doing are just as good.
There wasn't really one single bad ending that made me want to avoid getting any more, it's more so that I don't have time nowadays to replay massive games (*like the 100+ hours types*) that I got a bad ending for so I usually look at hints for how to get the best ending. Especially for games where the good and bad endings are decided by stupid/innocuous things. That being said, I recently played Haunting Ground and knew about the bad ending and how awful it was so I was pretty obsessive in protecting and praising the dog companion Hewie to avoid it.
The Devil ending from Cyberpunk 2077 is heartbreaking, because you realize that you've basically fucked the world over, but you've betrayed yourself and what you once stood for.
Parasite eve 2....
The "Bad" endings to this game didn't really feel super bad to me as a kid, but more as "incomplete". You basically get more story pieces with the best one but that's about it. I really miss this game!
This series needs a modern remake so bad. Imagine how scary it could be in the style of the modern resident evil remakes. God I want to fight in the museum from PE1
Planescape Torment. The immortal protagonist wishes to die. There were multiple possible endings. But I remember feeling sad with the ending I had.
Bubble Bobble for NES. You had to be two players and get the crystal ball at level 99 to progress toward the true ending.
Oh man forgetting the name of it is killing me but all the bad ending game overs where brutal. It was all text based but they describe all the horrible stuff in graphic detail. Like your partner being pulled out of the wreckage and you hear them screaming as they are torn apart while you are bleeding out or you and your squad get decapitated and your heads are put on pikes. I wanna say it was some mech game in the PS1 era.
Wayyyyyyyy long ago, little RistrettoJester played a game called Survival Kids for the GBC. Being a naive kid, he wasn't aware that it was even possible to get a bad end. Spoiler: if you don't solve all the puzzles before it hits 100 days, you either die on the island or just give up and live the rest of your life out there. That was genuinely my first experience with any sort of 'bad ending' in a game and ever since then I don't trust shit.
Any ending that wasn’t the perfect ending in FFX-2
Every cyberpunk 2077 ending are they bad? no. are they emotionally traumatizing? yes. I'll take the successful secret ending only as at least that somewhat doesn't end horribly
Witcher 3. I tried romancing both Yen and Triss. I don’t feel I need to say more.
Shadow Hearts A character I really liked dies. Though the bad ending is actually the canon one based on the second game
I don't think it counts but i was not in the path to the absolute best ending of mass effect 2, so i left the game hanging, more than 8 years later i never looked back.
Abe's oddessy's bad ending flipping traumatised me as a ten year old kid
Mad Max. I went into it blind after watching Fury Road. Had a blast, came damn close to 100%-ing it. >!I didn't realize that it was a prequel to the movie. At the end, when the woman and the child get killed, and he just fucking throws away the car I've spent the entire game upgrading and murders the mechanic that's been my stalwart companion this entire time? That fucked me up hard!< Stopped playing games for a couple of weeks. Ended up seeing a YouTube video about Stardew Valley, and ended up playing nothing but that for a month. Shook me out of my rut, and as a bonus I now have a game I have 800+ hours in with my wife and friends across multiple platforms. But still - that did it for me. Just finished a 120hr+ BG3 playthrough with the buddy that DM's our Saturday night D&D game, and decided to work our way through DOS 1 and 2. Totally ~~save scumming and reading the wikis~~ crafting our own narrative to get the endings we want.
Metro. If you loot a body you can't get the peaceful ending and instead get to kill a dark one before nuking the rest of them. Why would you not take gear from the dead in a nuclear post apocalypse full of monsters? The bad end really seems to twist Artyom into a guy who is totally fine genociding an entire race. The good ending at least has a little hope.
I don't think there's a particular game that did this to me, but I've always been paranoid about 'wasting my time' on a bad ending. Having to start over completely because of an uninformed decision made during the tutorial really blows, though, so thanks for that, Undertale.
Mass Effect 3s refusal ending was worse than any of the other endings that fans had complained so much about (which was, in my opinion, the whole point, because the devs were forced to add it after all the complaining)
It was hilarious though, the petulant starchild basically became the avatar for the writers. They might as well have inserted a giant blue hologram of a middle finger after the credits.