History Cliffhanger / VideoGames

* ''VideoGame/PennyArcadeAdventures Episode 3'' ends with [[spoiler:Tycho being murdered, Gabe and the BigBad being hurled through a wormhole while the former repeatedly punches the latter, and Moira and Jim being banished to what looks like Hell, where Jim acquires a full body (and vocal cords). The last shot is of an inexplicably alive Tycho surveying a wasteland, but he seems...''changed''.]]
** Which leads directly into the 4th game: [[spoiler: the world has been destroyed, all that remains is Hell (of the Under and Over varieties), and according to not-quite-right-Tycho, the only thing that can be done now is killing the final windowsill god to unmake the world in the hopes that a new one will be created.]]

* The ending of episode I in ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' has the marine finding himself teleported into a dark room with a damaging floor, surrounded on all sides by enemies, and unable to escape. The episode ends just as he's down to his last health points. Episode II, of course, begins with him alive and well. [[http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1376566 According to]] WordOfGod, the marine killed all the enemies and escaped (how he managed to do that within the half-second or so that separated him from death is left as an exercise to the reader.)

* ''VideoGame/DirgeOfCerberus'', the canonical ending to the ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' series, ends with Genesis saving the BigBad Weiss, then saying "there is still much to do". Nobody knows what they had to do because SE seems to have no plans to continue making FFVII games.

* ''VideoGame/Nocturne1999'' has four chapters, and then a fifth epilogue chapter once you complete the rest, which at best is a couple minutes long. Why? [[spoiler: Because the Stranger enters the Spookhouse HQ only to find Doc Holliday missing, the rest of his co-workers [[KillEmAll torn to bloody shreds]] with their numerous pieces left lying around in copious amounts of blood, and a message written in said blood proclaiming, "FINALLY FOUND YOU STRANGER".]] ToBeContinued. Terminal Reality hoped to make the sequel some day, but between being pulled across various publishers and ultimately being dissolved, the most that ever resulted of this was WordOfGod clarifying the culprit and nothing else.

* The second ''Franchise/AceAttorney'' game has this in the ''middle of the game''. At the end of episode 2, when [[spoiler:Morgan Fey]] is arrested for assisting in a murder, she is shown talking to someone; who's identity is unknown to the player, about how her time is coming and that her plan will soon come to be. This cliffhanger, who she's talking to, and what she means isn't resolved until the ''next game''.

* ''VideoGame/{{Nocturne}}'' has four chapters, and then a fifth epilogue chapter once you complete the rest, which at best is a couple minutes long. Why? [[spoiler: Because the Stranger enters the Spookhouse HQ only to find Doc Holliday missing, the rest of his co-workers [[KillEmAll torn to bloody shreds]] with their numerous pieces left lying around in copious amounts of blood, and a message written in said blood proclaiming, "FINALLY FOUND YOU STRANGER".]] ToBeContinued. Terminal Reality hoped to make the sequel some day, but between being pulled across various publishers and ultimately being dissolved, the most that ever resulted of this was WordOfGod clarifying the culprit and nothing else.

* ''VideoGame/MetroidFusion'' ends with Samus blowing up a Federation owned research space station, along with planet [=SR388=], in order to completely eradicate the X parasites whose existence would threaten the entire galaxy if they had escaped the station. Aside from the station being owned by the Federation, said Federation were also planning to capture the X parasites to study and weaponize them. With the X and the station both gone, Samus is effectively a wanted criminal. A sequel has yet to materialize and Nintendo has been very mum about whether or not one will ever be made.

* ''VideoGame/HalfLife2: Episode 2'' ended with [[spoiler:Eli Vance killed by Combine Advisors, and Gordon and Alyx about to depart for the Arctic to find the ''Borealis'' vessel and meet up with the Resistance members there.]] ''Episode 3'', which was slated to resolve this, is allegedly in DevelopmentHell, but as Valve seems to have a penchant for avoiding discussing it at all it's looking more and more like an unfortunate case of VaporWare.

* ''VideoGame/DirgeofCerberus'', the canonical ending to the ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' series, ends with Genesis saving the BigBad Weiss, then saying "there is still much to do". Nobody knows what they had to do because SE seems to have no plans to continue making FFVII games.

** ''Soul Reaver'' ends with Kain and Raziel fighting, only for Kain to use the Chronoplast to travel back in time. Raziel follows him, and ends up coming face-to-face with [[MadOracle Moebius the Timestreamer]]. Unique in that it wasn't meant to be a cliffhanger ending; the game's TroubledProduction resulted in Creator/CrystalDynamics ending the game there. Fittingly, ''Soul Reaver 2'''s intro is a retelling of these events, and starts off with Raziel meeting Moebius.

** ''VideoGame/GoldenSun2001'', you have only managed to climb up one of the four [[CosmicKeystone Elemental Lighthouses]] when you reach the final Dungeon, Venus Lighthouse. If you haven't been reading a guide (or spoiled by this example) you'd assume you were halfway through the game. To be fair, the game does provide some hints, the InfinityPlusOneSword is contained inside, and the music does lend the tower a tone of TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon. But once you reach the top, the game throws both the main antagonists of the story at you, you beat them, then they combine and throw the FinalBoss at you. Once you beat that, the game just ends. The missing friends are still missing, the party travels off to parts unknown, and the credits roll. Quite an impressive feat, making a very big cliffhanger that wasn't resolved for a few years when the second game came out.[[note]]This cliffhanger is the result of Camelot splitting what was supposed to be one game into two games, ''The Broken Seal'' and ''The Lost Age''.[[/note]]

* ''VideoGame/MetroidFusion'' ends with Samus blowing up a Federation owned research space station, along with planet SR388, in order to completely eradicate the X parasites whose existence would threaten the entire galaxy if they had escaped the station. Aside from the station being owned by the Federation, said Federation were also planning to capture the X parasites to study and weaponize them. With the X and the station both gone, Samus is effectively a wanted criminal. A sequel has yet to materialize and Nintendo has been very mum about whether or not one will ever be made.
* At the end of ''VideoGame/GoldenSunDarkDawn'', after everything looks happy and peaceful, the heroes return home and realize that they forgot to deal with those Psynergy Vortexes they were supposed to be dealing with. Now a far more threatening one has appeared outside the Lookout Cabin.

* At the end of ''[[VideoGame/{{Driver}} Driv3r]]'', Jericho shoots Tanner with a LastBreathBullet, then he is shown flatlining and the doctors try to defibrilate him. [[VideoGame/DriverSanFrancisco The next game]] starts with him in a coma.

** ''VideoGame/GoldenSunTheBrokenSeal'', you have only managed to climb up one of the four [[CosmicKeystone Elemental Lighthouses]] when you reach the final Dungeon, Venus Lighthouse. If you haven't been reading a guide (or spoiled by this example) you'd assume you were halfway through the game. To be fair, the game does provide some hints, the InfinityPlusOneSword is contained inside, and the music does lend the tower a tone of TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon. But once you reach the top, the game throws both the main antagonists of the story at you, you beat them, then they combine and throw the FinalBoss at you. Once you beat that, the game just ends. The missing friends are still missing, the party travels off to parts unknown, and the credits roll. Quite an impressive feat, making a very big cliffhanger that wasn't resolved for a few years when the second game came out.[[note]]This cliffhanger is the result of Camelot splitting what was supposed to be one game into two games, ''The Broken Seal'' and ''The Lost Age''.[[/note]]

* ''VideoGame/{{Turok}} 3: Shadow of Oblivion'' by Acclaim ends on a post-credits cliffhanger. [[spoiler:Adon tells the Council of Voices that she is certain that Joshua Fireseed, despite dying again following his brief resurrection by Oblivion, is still alive. Pleading for permission to try and save him, the council proclaims he was meant to die and denies her request. Adon adamantly says she will defy them and do it anyway before taking her leave. The council is then seen talking to a dark shaded female character who is told to "prepare herself" with the implication being that they have marked Adon for death and want Joshua to remain dead.]] Acclaim never resolved this ending with a direct sequel instead making one final Turok game, ''Turok: Evolution''. It wasn't a sequel but a prequel to the previous games and the comic series they spun off from. Any chance of a genuine sequel went out the window as Acclaim went bankrupt in 2004. The whole Turok universe was later rebooted in the 2008 game ''Turok'' by Touchstone Games putting the ending of Turok 3 in cliffhanger limbo.

* In VideoGame/GoldenSun, you have only managed to climb up one of the four [[CosmicKeystone Elemental Lighthouses]] when you reach the final Dungeon, Venus Lighthouse. If you haven't been reading a guide (or spoiled by this example) you'd assume you were halfway through the game. To be fair, the game does provide some hints, the InfinityPlusOneSword is contained inside, and the music does lend the tower a tone of TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon. But once you reach the top, the game throws both the main antagonists of the story at you, you beat them, then they combine and throw the FinalBoss at you. Once you beat that, the game just ends. The missing friends are still missing, the party travels off to parts unknown, and the credits roll. Quite an impressive feat, making a very big cliffhanger that wasn't resolved for a few years when the second game came out.
** To be fair, this cliffhanger is the result of Camelot splitting what was supposed to be one game into two games, Golden Sun 1 and The Lost Age.
** Another one is at the end of The Lost Age. [[spoiler: Alex has just been granted demi-god powers, but is then pinned to a mountaintop, and sent crashing down to the Earth, however, The Wise One implies they will meet again, and the last shot of the game, is Mt. Aleph still standing...]]
** The third game Dark Dawn has its own as well. After everything looks happy and peaceful. The heroes return home and they realize that there was one thing they didn't look into to solve. Now it appears to be far more threatening then it was when they last encountered it.
* A (particularly frustrating) example with ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}'': Cortana in the clutches of the Gravemind. Miranda, Arbiter and Johnson stuck on Delta Halo. Master Chief emerging from slipspace, stowed away on an enemy ship, to find Earth's defenses about to be overwhelmed by the Covenant fleet. Roll credits with nothing more than a heroic one-liner. Only partially resolved with ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}'' - We see Master Chief arriving on Earth, but we don't see how Arbiter and co. get back. How MC actually got off the enemy ship is explored in the spin-off comic series ''ComicBook/HaloUprising'', and Cortana's fate is a plot-point for the rest of the game.

* Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 ends on a rather big one. The Invasion of the US is stopped and presumably the US counterstrike is about to begin. Soap and Price are wanted Fugitives, [[spoiler:Shepherd]] is dead but his plan is in motion and you still have no idea where [[spoiler: Makarov]] is.
** The Sequel shows that the war becomes over near the end of the game, and also [[spoiler: Soap dies from a later injury from a mission, and Price gets a BSOD]], and in the final mission, Price [[spoiler: kills Makarov with Punches and with the finish of Makarov being hanged.]]

* ''VideoGame/LifeIsStrange''. While Episodes 1 & 2 end on some form of closure, the ending of Episode 3, where Max [[spoiler: inadvertently finds herself in an alternate timeline where Chloe is paralyzed]], is just plain cruel.

* ''VideoGame/{{Nocturne}}'' has four chapters, and then a fifth epilogue chapter once you complete the rest, which at best is a couple minutes long. Why? [[spoiler: Because the Stranger enters the Spookhouse HQ only to find Doc Holliday missing, the rest of his co-workers [[KillEmAll torn to bloody shreds]] with their numerous pieces left lying around in copious amounts of blood, and a message written in said blood proclaiming, "FINALLY FOUND YOU STRANGER".]] TheEnd. Terminal Reality hoped to make the sequel some day, but between being pulled across various publishers and ultimately being dissolved, the most that ever resulted of this was WordOfGod clarifying the culprit and nothing else.

* ''VideoGame/SlyCooperThievesInTime'' [[DownerEnding ends]] with the titular character [[spoiler:MIA (a secret ending reveals he's stuck in Ancient Egypt)]], and one former ally [[spoiler:sending postcards to her ex after escaping prison]]. Sanzaru Games has since stated that [[ScrewedByTheNetwork they will not produce a sequel]], which resulted in InternetBackdraft and FanonDiscontinuity.

* ''VideoGame/BendyAndTheInkMachine'' Chapter 1 ends with Henry discovering a room with coffins and a pentagram, having some sort of vision or hallucination, and passing out. Though it's implied that Joey Drew may have been into the occult - which may have a hand in the ink monsters found around the studio - the images that Henry saw were never fully explained in-game.

* ''VideoGame/BendyAndTheInkMachine'' Chapter 1 ends with Henry discovering a room with coffins and a pentagram, having some sort of vision or hallucination, and passing out. Though it's implied that Joey Drew may have been into the occult - which may have a hand in the ink monsters found around the studio - the images that Henry saw have not been explained as of Chapter 4.

* ''[[VideoGame/EccoTheDolphin Ecco: The Tides of Time]]'' ends with the eponymous dolphin protagonist following the Vortex Queen into the time machine and "disappearing into time". WordOfGod said he had something in mind involving the Atlanteans, but alas, the third installment never materialized; the [[UsefulNotes/SegaDreamcast Dreamcast]][=/=][=PS2=] game ''Defender of the Future'' was instead a ContinuityReboot by a different developer.