SPOILERS BELOW. THIS ENTIRE ARTICLE IS NOTHING BUT SPOILERS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
The average video game runs at a price of around 40-60$ and takes roughly three days to several weeks to complete (depending on difficulty and the time you have available to play). A good long form story-based game takes a lot of your energy and commitment to finish. Every twist and turn, every new character, every moment sucks you in and you end up spending the better half of your day working your thumbs to the bone to get closer to that big finish; that climax that you’ve been working towards for weeks.
Sometimes, your hard work is rewarded with a beautiful, well-written ending. There’s a grueling yet not mind-numbingly frustrating boss fight, a beautiful moral theme, and all of your favourite characters stand by your side while you fight. All loose ends are wrapped up and you end the game feeling satisfied and like a changed person. But not all games were made equal.
Some brilliant games spoil hours of amazing and mind-blowing gameplay with poorly written, frustrating, or just plain confusing endings. Some endings undo everything the game made you do. Literally hours or even weeks of gameplay is simply rendered irrelevant by the ending. Some endings are even well written but are just incredibly frustrating and leave players in a rage rather than pleasantly satisfied.
So without further ado, let’s go through fifteen amazing games with the most infuriating endings.
15 Fabled Disappointment
The first game in the Fable series was amazing. The gameplay was unique and exciting- there was nothing you couldn’t do. And your moral behaviour truly did affect the game. However, all of that was kind of thrown away with the ending. The game ends with a choice: will you put on the legendary mask that is the host to the soul of Jack, thus making you the evil beings new host (which also involves ending the life of your sister)? Or will you cast the mask into the flames and end his tyranny forever? The mask will do everything it can to try to convince you to wear it but your characters moral alignment will pretty much make the choice for you. Besides, the choice you make doesn’t even matter at all as the game ends pretty much immediately afterward.
14 Massively Disappointing
Why do so many games live and die by their moral choices? Moral choices can leave you questioning your entire belief system and blow your mind… or they can either completely undo all of your gameplay or have no impact on gameplay whatsoever. Mass Effect is a game that knows how to do moral choices right… except when it doesn’t. This series built up the climactic conclusion to its epic saga for years. Fans were waited with baited breath to see how the game would wrap up the loose ends and were massively disappointed when they found out that it all wound down to a moral choice that didn’t actually do anything. No matter what ending you choose, the outcome will be the same. And making matters worse, that choice actually undoes literally every other choice you made in the entire series.
13 The Devil’s In The Repetition
Though the updated aesthetic presented in the third Diablo game was a very debated hot topic within the fandom, most fans agreed that the overall gameplay was quite engaging. That is, until the developer released a DLC add-on which literally undid all of your hard work from its parent game. When playing Diablo III, you spend literal real-world hours cleaning up the mess that the fallen star left behind. You spend weeks of gameplay just meandering through cathedrals, open forest, and the desert getting rid of all the monsters that are wandering around, willy-nilly. And then this DLC comes in and releases them all back into the world. Literally all of them. I would honestly rather hit myself with my XBOX controller than have to pay to have all of my progress undone.
12 Eye Of The Storm
Now, this game isn’t an example of a bad ending… it’s an example of an ending that frustrated me so deeply that I woke up my partner to rant at them when I finished the game at 4 am. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Life is Strange games more than I love my own family. But Before The Storm’s final cutscene jerks you out of a beautiful moment with a dark realization. Chloe saves Rachel repeatedly and they fall in love. It’s beautiful until you realize that during this sweet montage Rachel is cheating on Chloe, lying to her, and is about to face a horrible end. The game even reminds you of this by Rachel being hurt in Jefferson’s photography studio. We know this is coming. Why couldn’t things have ended on a happy note for once?
11 Knights Of The Unfinished Republic
Now, Star Wars games (and apparently movies as well) have a reputation for infuriating fans. I mean, there is no one who hates Star Wars as much as the members of its own fandom. But Knights of the Old Republic is a special kind of infuriating. Not only does this game feature a moral choice ending based on your Jedi/Sith alignment but those endings were not created equally. The Jedi/good moral alignment is defined by its inaction while the dark side is filled with excitement and fun. If you pick the good ending, you get to enjoy an unplayable award ceremony cutscene. However, if you decide to go down the evil route (and you should) you find out that you are actually Darth Revan, a man who was captured by the Jedi and brainwashed into being good.
10 Bordering On Insanity
Now I, like many people, love a game with a good build up. It just feels so good to be working towards something and the feeling you get when your hard work pays off is just the most satisfying thing that you will ever experience in your human lifetime. Just knowing that every move you make is building up to this moment where everything will be revealed is so exhilarating. However, when Borderlands tried to recreate this classic plot, they majorly missed the mark. You spend the entire game hearing about this legendary vault. Everyone you meet tells you about this vault and you spend hours of gameplay trying to find this vault to see what is inside of it. When you finally defeat the biggest bad boss of the game, you reach the vault. Which is promptly locked for another 200 years without ever letting you see the inside.
9 I Want To Escape… Never Mind
Undertale is one of the most creative, entertaining, and Easter egg-filled games that I have ever played. The level of detail put into this game is mind-boggling and the ending made me cry real human tears. Like Before the Storm, Undertale’s ending isn’t bad by any means but it is incredibly frustrating. If you work your butt off to achieve the true pacifist ending, you will be greeted with the most heart wrenching and frustrating ending possible. Your character spends the entire game trying to get back to the human world, yet the moment you break the surface you realize that there is nothing for you there. So you cling to Toriel, making your attempt to get away from her and back to the human world completely irrelevant. You could have saved yourself a lot of work by just staying with Toriel in the first place.
8 Lethal Water Maintenance
Life is not all sunshine and rainbows after the nuclear fallout pretty much wipes humanities slate clean. And navigating the post-apocalyptic world can be made even more difficult when you are forced to make moral decisions that will affect how all other characters react to you and think of you. Nothing makes the apocalypse harder than dealing with punishment for your social faux pas. The biggest moral choice sits at the end of the game: your character needs to fix the radiation filled water purification system (which will quickly end their lives) in order to save everyone else. You have the choice of doing it yourself or you can try to convince your partner to sacrifice herself. But your choice doesn’t really matter because the game ends immediately afterward. Your moral choices throughout the game affect the narration during the final cutscene, but that’s it.
7 Second Verse Same As The First
The Fable games sure do love their moral choices. And like the first game, the sequel ends with a big one. However, unlike the first game, this moral choice has an actual effect on the game. The gameplay doesn’t end after the choice has been made. After you defeat the game’s big bad in a battle that was over faster than any of the other fights in the game (including your run-ins with experience fodder bandits), you are faced with a choice. Do you resurrect all of the people that Lucien destroyed? Do you revive your sister and beloved dog? Or do you accept a cash reward and take off? You are told this is your choice and your choice alone and that it will be respected. But unless you pick the first/right answer, you will be shamed for the rest of the time you play.
6 Age Of War
It starts with our good friend, Anders, who has a huge issue with the Templars. I’m talking an issue of cataclysmic proportions. So what does Anders do with his thinly veiled rage? He decides to blow up the Templars head office. Though this act doesn’t end a lot of lives, it is a huge insult to the Templars, who do not take this lightly. Anders sparks the war between the mages and the Templars. The Templars plan to end the lives of all of the mages while the mages whip out an entire black magic spell book and start performing blood magic and summoning demons. This sparks mass insanity which causes characters to go against their core beliefs… which forces us to have to end the lives of the leaders of both sides of the battle. And there is nothing you can do to stop this from happening.
5 Plot As Old As Time
Uncharted 2 was basically the “male” (if we are prescribing to the idea that games are gendered) version of the Tomb Raider games. There’s in-depth puzzles, climbing majestic sets, and the main focus of the game in decoding and exploration. We are explorers, not fighters whose main goal is centered around uncovering the secrets of Shambhala. However, the game sort of abandons that theme entirely and descends into a typical, action style, gunslinging shootout game. But the worst part about this third act tone shift is that the game can’t even commit to its own change. Rather than allowing us to unleash our inner Bruce Willis and shoot our way through the game, we end up chickening out and running away from a boss battle. We never even get the satisfaction of defeating the game’s main villain.
4 Joker’s Crazy Train
Batman: Arkham Asylum made the same fatal last act thematic switch that Uncharted 2 and it totally threw players off and turned many off from the game entirely. Until that final boss battle comes along, the entire game was focused on the Joker’s psychological manipulation of Batman. It’s mainly puzzle-based. It’s filled with intricate twists and turns that are supposed to drive both Batman and the player mad. However, near the end of the game Batman and the Joker face off in the weirdest fight scene ever made. For some unexplained reason, the Joker decides to load himself up with a huge dose of God knows what. He turns to battle Batman as this roided out monster. What? This intense puzzle focused game descended into this weird almost Mortal Kombat style boss fight for no reason.
3 Enraptured ‘Til 3 Hours Before the End
So like (almost) every game on this list, BioShock manages to be an insanely fun and engaging game up until it’s final act. It is incredibly well written, the game itself is beautiful, and uncovering the world’s lore is thrilling and gratifying. Players were blown away by Andrew Ryan’s final scene but were mildly disappointed by the rest of the game. For some reason unbeknownst to the player, the gameplay continues for nearly 3 hours after the game’s climax has occurred and the story has been wrapped up. It is amusing to think that most games on this list are infuriating because of their abrupt end while BioShock is grating for deciding to continue on far longer than it should have. Luckily this issue was fixed in the universally loved sequels.
2 Outlast Your Enemies… Never Mind
Outlast is one of the greatest survival horror games out there. It’s frustrating in its own right. The forced pacifism can become annoying when you’re being ripped by enemies and can’t fight back at all. But overall, the game keeps you interested and entertained. For those of you haven’t played Outlast, let me explain the sole objective of the game. Your only job is to get out of that asylum alive. That’s it. And that objective is impossible to achieve. After you’ve successfully navigated the entire game and are seconds from finally escaping, you will be gunned down by an entire SWAT team in an unplayable cutscene. It’s infuriating to the point that it is almost a slap in the face to players.
1 Far Cry From A Real Resolution
The developers of Far Cry 3 heard that you wanted choices that matter. They knew that gamers were sick of making choices that didn’t change a thing, so they decided to make a game that ended on the final choice to end all final choices. Most games end with a final choice which contains options that are more or less slightly different versions of each other. But Far Cry 3 went out on a limb and created the two most diverse endings humanly possible.
The first ending is a beautiful ending. You choose to save your friends and attempt to return to your regular life. It’s explained that that will be impossible due to the trauma you’ve faced. My heart goes out to those who chose the brief and anticlimactic second ending which results in your love interest ending your life after a mating ritual ‘praying mantis’ style.
