This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, which means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE listed below is a Spoiler by default and will be unmarked without a tag. Only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.
Cruel Twist Endings in Video Games.- In the Fighting Game Akatsuki Blitzkampf, Anonym's ending is this through and through, because right after she defeats the Big Bad Murakumo... she's at the receiving end of her Arch-Enemy Mycale's Grand Theft Me.
- Ben and Ed: You play as Ed the zombie, who has befriended a young boy, Ben, in an apocalyptic world. Ben is captured and used as bait for Ed to follow in a difficult and deadly obstacle-course game show. Once the show is stopped and Ed escapes to find Ben, they embrace. Then it turns out that Ed was never really Ben's friend, and he wasn't chasing after Ben to rescue him. He only saw Ben as a potential meal and Ed devours him alive.
- BioShock Infinite:
- The ending of the main game, once you can parse out the Mind Screw: you've defeated Comstock, driven back the Vox Populi, and destroyed the siphon that limits Elizabeth's powers. Well, you've defeated one Comstock, out of an infinite number of alternate universes. "You" are not the first Booker to be called to Columbia - the Lutece twins have brought over a hundred alternate Bookers to take down Comstock, but you are the first to succeed at killing even one. And, as it turns out, Booker and Comstock are alternate universe versions of each other, decided by whether he is baptized following the Battle of Wounded Knee. To kill all Comstocks permanently is to snip the rose at the bud by drowning Booker at his baptism, which destroys Elizabeth, his at-that-time-unborn daughter, as well. There's the implication that some version of Booker and baby Elizabeth somewhere survived this process, but no confirmation is ever given.
- Episode I of the DLC Burial at Sea, which began as a What-If story of Booker and Elizabeth in Rapture, is just as brutal in its ending. The "Booker" you play as is actually a Comstock, who accidentally killed Elizabeth while trying to kidnap her and moved to Rapture to escape. Elizabeth came to Rapture partially to find a girl she was searching for (who was turned into a Little Sister), but primarily to kill you. Which she does, via Big Daddy. Before, as the beginning of the next episode reveals, being killed herself.
- Episode II ends with Elizabeth being tortured and killed by Fontaine while setting up the events of Bioshock I. There is a silver lining in that Sally, the Little Sister at the heart of the mystery in the DLC, survives and goes on to be one of the 5 children adopted by Jack.
- Bloodborne on a whole can count numerous times.
- Most explicitly is the second ending. Should you fight and defeat Gherman, but fail to obtain the necessary amount of umbilical cords to deflect the powers of the Moon Presence, you are absorbed by it. Gherman is now free in death, and you are seen being pushed around in his chair by the doll, implying you now suffer the unending life and fate of Gherman until someone comes along and bests you.
- The sidequest for Father Gascoigne's family is tragic. You can encounter a young girl in her home and she asks you to find her missing parents. She gives you a music box which works on the boss (proving Gascoigne is her father) and you get a red brooch on a woman's corpse which you can give the girl, confirming that her father killed her mother, then fought you and subsequently died. You can tell her to go to Iosefka's Clinic where she is turned into a monster or to Oedon Chapel for safety. If sent to the chapel, you can later kill a large boar in the sewers and get a red ribbon, proving the girl fled to the chapel, but was ultimately killed anyways. Later on if you approach her house, you find out she has a sister who only just got home. If you give her the red ribbon, she will weep over the death of her family. Return later still, and you can see her corpse, laying face down, having leapt to her death out of grief. The only way for the younger sister not to die is to never speak to the girl, potentially saving her sister too as she would eventually come home and reunite with her only living family.
- Simon in the DLC is desperately hunted over and over by Brador, an NPC hunter who actively uses a sinister bell in an effort to kill anyone in the Nightmare. Simon ultimately never succeeds in escaping Brador, eventually dying as he begs to know why Brador keeps attacking him before weakly saying it just isn't fair.
- Despite Ludwig's best efforts to create the Hunter's Workshop, he ultimately became a beast much like the rest of his Church. Should you be honest after defeating him about the failure of the workshop, he will weep at the realization that everything he did was for naught, and his legacy is all but gone.
- The entirety of the lore behind the DLC is a tragic realization that, in an effort to kill a Great One and stop the powers it could unleash, they murdered an entire hamlet of fisherman and the pregnant Kos. In its throes of death, Kos trapped every hunter within a nightmare (save for Gherman who was taken by the Moon Presence) and held them hostage forever within. Most went mad and became blood-drunk, others (like Lady Maria) spent the last however-many-years lamenting their decision and questioning why they ever did any of this. In the end, they can't even stop you from killing the Orphan despite it not deserving such a thing.
- Alfred, a die-hard believer in the Executioners, is overjoyed when you obtain a summons to Cainhurst and give it to him, allowing him to finish the work his former master started. Ultimately he does, and kills the Queen, however he then takes his own life. A view of his model up-close reveals his pupils collapsing, implying that either he killed himself to become a martyr, or he killed himself because he was becoming a beast. In a cruel twist, you can revive the queen quite easily, making everything he did absolutely worthless. Even worse, you can join the queen in collecting Blood Dregs for her, the exact thing Alfred was trying to stop.
- Should you send the Suspicious Beggar to the chapel, you'll notice NPCs going missing until only the Chapel Dweller remains, and the Suspicious Beggar is never seen again. Ultimately, as it turns out, he is an Abhorrent Beast in disguise. Should you ever attack him, even before sending him to the chapel, he will reveal his true form. If you are unaware of this, you will accidentally send everyone to their deaths who go to the chapel.
- Can Your Pet? It's a cutesy, minute-long Nintendogs-esque game, but with chicks instead of puppies. The shock in the ending comes into full circle once you realize that the game's title is NOT a typo upon unlocking the bike and using it.
- Call of Duty: Ghosts: So Logan and Hesh defeat Rorke, shooting him and leaving him for dead when the train falls into the water. Roll credits. Cue The Stinger during said credits in which Rorke somehow survives and captures Logan to become a Ghost killer.
- In Chzo Mythos' 7 Days A Skeptic you survive the murderous rampage of an unstoppable killer, and get to reach the rescue ship in time. You reach them only to find that they have actually come to arrest you for murder as you have actually been an impostor of the character the entire time, and for convenience, they charge you with the rest of the murders as well. The best part? 6 Days a Sacrifice implies you were the killer after all.
- Most of the Multiple Endings in the Clock Tower games are this. Didn't find Lotte before boarding the elevator? Lights cut out and you hear Scissorman's laugh. Went to the wrong location to look for the demon statue? Jennifer's found dead in her room and someone's behind the door. Didn't bother to check that suit of armor? It unavoidably falls on you an hour of gameplay later and kills you instantly. The list goes on and on for this series.
- Crackdown: You've spent the entire game tearing down the three gangs who turned Pacific City into a hellhole, brought peace and hope back to the people, and the Director congratulates you for a job well done...then surprise! It turns out the Agency was Evil All Along. They supplied and supported all three gangs and ran the city's police force into the ground, all from behind the scenes, to create the very problem the Agency would be needed to stop. The Director gloats that you are the harbinger of a new world order and that Pacific City is just the beginning.
- Cyber-Lip, a Neo Geo sidescrolling shooter, has the time honored plotline of 'Humanity builds super-computer to fight evil aliens, super-computer itself turns evil and destroys Earth, one/two guy(s) must shoot everything including berserk computer.' In the rather sparse ending, it turns out that the super-computer was NOT evil, just reprogrammed. As the heroes fly back to their home base, their leader congratulates them on a job well done — and mentions how there are no more obstacles in their way just as he gives a nasty smirk while his eyes glow red, revealing that, surprise, he's one of those aliens. That's when it hits you that you've been a part of their ultimate plan, and you've done everything possible to help them achieve it...
- While a majority of the endings in Cyberpunk 2077 are all bittersweet at best or utterly bleak, "The Tower" ending, added by completing the Phantom Liberty DLC and ensuring that Songbird ends up back in the hands of the NUSA, is particularly cruel. In it, V decides to call up the FIA for the cure that they promised. The resulting operation successfully saves V's life at the cost of destroying Johnny Silverhand's engram as well as the resulting nervous damage preventing V from ever using anything but the most basic of cyberware, cutting down any hopes of being a Living Legend and making them weak enough to be mugged by common street thugs. Also, two years have passed, during which the world has changed and most of the friends they've made have largely moved on. The result is that rather than going out in a blaze of glory, V instead is likely to slowly fade away into the crowds. The only consolation is that Reed personally offers them a desk job at Langley.
- Darkest Dungeon: After losing your sanity by acting as mission control to the most fucked-up dungeon crawl in human history, choosing which half of your party to sacrifice during the final boss battle, and defeating the Eldritch Abomination responsible for controlling every monster your ancestor created, you finally discover that you killed a redundant organ. The Darkest Dungeon is in fact an egg that takes up most of Earth's core, one which feeds off of the cycle of life itself. When the cosmic beast inside is done incubating, it will destroy the Earth in an explosive hatching. Crushed by the horror of everything, you commit suicide, only for another descendant to show up. Why and how they are there is left unknown. Of course, it is the aforementioned horrible abomination that made humanity saying this, and there is plenty of space and a few reasons to believe it's just spitefully lying.
- Dear Mariko: Mariko's boyfriend just broke up with her. You spend the whole game rooting for the protagonist against the scary stalker woman who's been going Yandere over her boyfriend and trying to kill her. But at no point in the game was it ever said that the protagonist was Mariko...the game just set it up such that you'd assume so, only for it to come crashing on you in the True Ending.
- The 1st Loop endings of DonPachi. Congratulations! You've been fighting and killing your allies this whole time! Sucker!
- Doom (2016) has the Doomslayer survive insurmountable odds, discovering his origins, trashing Hell to a bloody pulp, destroying the source of the demonic invasion and defeating Olivia Pierce in her Spider Mastermind form and finally he comes back to Mars just for Samuel Hayden to take the Crucible from him, announce that with it he can resume researching (and exploiting) Argent energy, and using the last charge of the Cyberdemon's core to teleport the Doomslayer to parts unknown just to get him out of the way. Cue the sequel...
- Drakengard is infamous for this. Heavy spoilers follow, obviously.
- In Ending B, the protagonist's dead sister is placed into one of the "Seeds of Resurrection" in an attempt to bring her back to life, but instead she's reborn as a giant flying monstrosity. After one of the hardest boss fights in the game, the player is presented with the sight of the protagonist holding the body of his sister in his arms, as dozens more of her clones rise up into the sky from other Seeds, ready to destroy humanity.
- In Ending C, the dragon who was the protagonist's loyal companion throughout the whole game is forced to break the pact and fight the protagonist to death. Upon your victory, the protagonist leaves the temple only to find that the world outside is overrun with dragons exterminating the remaining humans. He is then shown clutching his sword tightly and charging into the fray, presumably ready to die in a hopeless battle.
- In Ending D, the whole party including the protagonist and the dragon are killed by enemy forces one by one. The last surviving party member seals himself, the Queen of the monsters, and the whole city in a timeless zone for an eternity.
- In Ending E, the protagonist, his dragon and the monster queen are transported into modern-day Tokyo, where an infamously difficult battle using rhythm game controls takes place. After defeating the queen, the protagonist and the dragon are shot down by JSDF jet fighters. The last frame of the game is the dragon's body impaled on Tokyo Tower, accompanied with a "Thank you for playing". Even worse is that this ending is what leads to Nier, as the body of the queen ends up becoming the source of that game's "White Chlorination Syndrome".
- Eversion plays with this. That princess you're out to save? She's an Eldritch Abomination who will eat you alive. But if you collect all the gems, it turns out you're an abomination too - which makes for a surprisingly good ending as you and the princess fall in love.
- Fantasy Zone: Guess what? The commander of the enemy soldiers was actually Opa-Opa's dad!
- Far Cry:
- The bad ending for Far Cry 3 is almost comically brutal. By choosing to side with Citra, you slice the throat of your girlfriend, younger brother, and all your other friends before making love to each other. Shortly after the deed is done, Citra stabs you in the chest, having obtained the seed of "the ultimate warrior", and you basically have killed your friends for nothing.
- Far Cry 5 plays mostly like its two predecessors, until you've witnessed all three endings and realize there's absolutely no way to bring the Big Bad to justice. You either capitulate right in the intro cinematic, let him get off scot-free during your final confrontation and assumingly get yourself brainwashed into killing all your friends afterwards, or you arrest him and thus trigger nuclear armageddon out of absolutely freaking nowhere, which means this raving lunatic was right all along. Doesn't get much more unsatisfying than that. Fortunately, everything is rectified in Far Cry: New Dawn, where not only does that game's hero defeat the villains there, but also finally deals with the previous villain.
- Triple subverted in Golden Sun: The Lost Age. At the end of the game, the heroes fight a giant three-headed dragon so they can cast the Mars Star into Mars Lighthouse and restore Alchemy to the world. Once they defeat it, it's revealed they just killed a fused form of Isaac's kidnapped father and Felix and Jenna's kidnapped parents. Then they activate the Lighthouse, and the eruption of Mars energy brings them all back to life. The heroes return home to find that Mt. Aleph has erupted, destroying their entire hometown of Vale and everyone in it, including Isaac's mother and Garet's entire family. Then it's revealed that the Wise One evacuated all of the inhabitants to safety, and everybody joyously reunites.
- Just like most of the Goosebumps books in the main series, Goosebumps HorrorLand ends this way. Just as everything seems to work out fine, what with your character, their friend, and the little girl they rescued managing to escape the titular Amusement Park of Doom to freedom against all odds, the last moments of the game reveal that the little girl, Gigi, is The Great Gargantua, and now that she's free, she plans to turn the whole world into her own personal HorrorLand.
- The ending of Grand Theft Auto IV. In the penultimate mission, the player is offered the choice of doing a drug deal with the Big Bad or taking revenge on him for all the things he's done. Niko's cousin Roman will lobby you for the former and Niko's girlfriend Kate will push for the latter. The cruel twist is that whichever path you take, the character who suggested it (ie the one the player listened to and is more invested in) will die at Roman's wedding.
- The ending to the Gregory Horror Show PS2 game reveals that, despite everything you did, the hotel will always be rebuilt, Gregory and the other guests will always rise again, and that the trauma you've gone through will make it impossible to reintegrate with society, leading you to come back to the hotel...and that's exactly what happens.
- Perhaps the most surprising ending in the history of video games due to its humorous and lighthearted mood throughout, near the end of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 you take part in a rather gruesome series of events where you have to destroy everyone your character holds dear with the game making you feel every horrifying action. Finally, when you approach the final boss, she simply laughs about how you've basically played into her hands all along as an Unwitting Pawn to the end of Gamindustri, which is the opposite of what you were trying to do in the first place, and now it doesn't even matter if you defeat her because the entire world's going to collapse and everyone's going to die. Roll credits. Fortunately, this is NOT the true end.
- Immortal Defense:
- After everyone on your planet is wiped out by the Bavakh due to Aa misleading you in order to save his planet, you decide to help the Bavakh fight and defeat Aa, becoming a hero to the Bavakh instead. You're then contacted by your granddaughter who informs you that they survived and are rebuilding your world. Naturally, you return to defending them from the Bavakh. The ending reveals that your granddaughter was a hallucination, there is no rebuilding, and you've been defending a dead world by mass murdering the Bavakh who previously saw you as an ally. You play the final chapter of the campaign as an Pathspace spirit, insane due to being alone for several hundred years, mindlessly shooting anything that wanders into that area of space until the Universe ends.
- Aa gets a Cruel Twist Ending too. He assumes that the destruction of your preserved body will kill you in Pathspace, and tries to achieve this by sending the ship holding his preserved body to kill yours. But when that ship is destroyed, he realizes that you and he are trapped in Pathspace permanently. Unable to face that, but also unable to die, he decides to just.. do nothing. Forever. (Although if you reach the hidden chapter of the campaign, you discover that he didn't manage that.)
- Jinxter's famously bad ending. The game begins with the player character about to be run over by a bus, and then awaking in a mysterious, magical world where they become one of its guardians. If you successfully save the world, it turns out you didn't die and awaken in another world; you're quite alive, and the folks in the other world have no idea what was happening on Earth. They helpfully teleport you right back to where and when you left from - that is, right in front of the bus, to your immediate death.
- Klonoa: Door to Phantomile: After Klonoa saves the world, what happens? His friend Huepow reveals that A) Klonoa isn't really an inhabitant of Phantomile like the game establishes him to be, and B) he's actually got fake memories of his entire life and the only reason why he's here is that they just wanted him to be the one to save it. Oh, and also? He doesn't even let the poor kid fully process the truth when he actually sends him back to where he really belongs.Klonoa: No... It's a lie! It's a lie! It's a lie!! It's a lie!!!
- Knights of the Old Republic, due to a long line of retcons,
Character Derailment, and Depending on the Author.- The True Sith set up the Mandalorians to go rampaging. Revan and Malak defy the Council's cowardice and inaction by trying to stop the invasion. He Who Fights Monsters kicks in, they start falling to the Dark Side, and whip out a Colony Drop weapon so horrific that even the Mandalorians are shocked by its brutality. The one Jedi who refused to go Sith with them is brutally cut off from the Force, and comes back to the Council to offer an olive branch, only to get spit on and told "get out." Revan goes on a rampage through known space, ostensibly to "unite it" against the bigger threat, only for Malak to decide he just wants to rule and backstab Revan. No matter how you play it, in the second game you're now playing that outcast Jedi. The Sith and the Republic are in complete ruins, Revan's vanished to force-knows-where, everyone either distrusts you or wants to use you for something, and no matter how the Exile works the angles, the Council is still dead, the Republic is still a mess, and you're still about as popular as a mutant at an anti-mutant rally. Kreia rubs it all in with her last speech. And the new game, 300 years later? The big threat Revan was trying to stop emerges from hiding, beats the crap out of the Republic...and it's stated "on panel" that Revan and Exile were never seen again after their respective games, meaning they likely died horribly and pointlessly.
- It gets worse in The Old Republic. Republic adventurers will rescue Revan from prison and Mind Rape, so that he can enact his black-ops mission to kill the majority of the empire. Imperial adventurers will find Revan losing to The Corruption, now on the verge of committing genocide (Ironically, this would kill the empire, but not the more important source) and has to be put down. Bonus points for having Revan's last words directed at Malak and him finally recognizing the fully-corrupted Jedi as a friend. Also, the Exile was killed pointlessly by a Sith just to Kick the Dog and prove he's a bastard. And even after that, Revan's dark spirit returns in an attempt to awaken the Sith Emperor that would have resulted in the latter consuming the galaxy and succeeds, with Vitiate later consuming all life on Ziost and plunging the galaxy into an even greater war with a big secret army out of nowhere.
- From the same story: a minor plot on the first world was the quest for a group outcasts for the Promised Land, a forgotten colony that would have protected them from the orbital bombardment that destroyed their world. In the MMO you find out that while it kept them alive, the shelter was destroyed and their descendants eked out a miserable existence for a few generations before all being killed by toxic waste poisoning.
- In the second part of Left 4 Dead's comic for The Sacrifice
, Zoey discovers that the carrier gene which has allowed her to avoid the infection is passed on by the father. She then recalls that at the start of the zombie ordeal, she killed her father after he was bitten, on his request, since he assumed he would turn into a zombie and wanted to die as himself, having no idea he was a carrier. - The Medieval Chapter in Live A Live drags Oersted through the mud. Oersted ends up killing the ruling king, having been tricked by an illusion to believe him to be the dreaded Lord of Dark, and gets ostracized by everyone. His few comrades die and then Streibough, an old friend of his, turns out to have orchestrated everything to ruin Oersted. Oersted is forced to fight Streibough to the death and wins, but he can finally rescue his beloved fiancée, Alethea...only for her to yell at him for having supposedly abandoned her, having killed her father and lover, meaning Streibough. And then she proceeds to commit suicide. With everything Oersted fought for and the hope that even one single person may still believe in him now gone, he utterly breaks and decides that, if everyone believed him to be the real Lord of Dark, then he might as well take up the mantle himself.
- In Mad Father, the titular Mad Father's goal was to turn Aya into a doll so she never turned out like him, believing his madness was hereditary. The kicker? He was right. In the game's true ending, Aya is shown to have become a doctor in the future, killing patients to collect their body parts just like her dear old dad. At least she has the decency to anesthetize them first.
- With the Extended Cut Downloadable Content for Mass Effect 3, it added in the Refusal ending. In it, Shepard refused to activate the Crucible (or shooting the Catalyst), preferring to go down fighting against the Reapers. Without the Crucible, galactic civilization fell to the Reapers. If it weren't for Liara's warning, the next cycle wouldn't have succeeded in defeating the Reapers.
- In Maze 5: Sinister Play, Sophie escapes from the horror scenario Reality Warper twins placed her in and is reunited with her best friends JP and Dario, who were placed in scenarios of their own. After she hears their stories and questions the improbability of their survival, they comment that they "kinda died" in actuality and then turn into the twins, leaving her alone and weeping by the side of the road.
- The true ending of Mogeko Castle. After everything that Yonaka had gone through, ending the story with her reunion with Shinya and arriving home to blood everywhere, despite still being a downer, would have been a more merciful decision than forcing Yonaka to Mercy Kill Shinya, after which it's revealed that this is a story she is being read by King Mogeko, meaning either her mental state is so deteriorated that she's haunted by the trauma in her life...or despite her efforts, she's once again a prisoner of Mogeko Castle. Yonaka can't catch a break!
- My Little Pegasus: Kizuna DoPonyPachi:
- Win against Angra Mainyu on 1st loop? TUTORIAL COMPLETE.
- Clear the Tsuujou loop? It was All Just a Dream and Equestria is still in danger.
- Clear the obscenely hard Ura loop and defeat the True Final Boss? All your friends are dead.
- Congratulations, you've finished NieR, destroyed the Shadowlord and rescued your daughter. Even if it did turn out you're both Artificial Humans and the Shadowlord was the "real" Nier. Then you read Grimoire Nier and realize that the human race will go extinct in a generation without the Shadowlord. Oh, and Yonah is still dying of the Black Scrawl.
- NieR: Automata:
- The sidequests are fond of these. To name one example: "The Wandering Couple". You spend much of the quest-line helping this pair of Resistance androids, who wish to leave the Resistance and just eke out a peaceful existence together, until finally they decide that they can't survive on their own and that they need to reformat themselves in order to return to the Resistance. Cue The Reveal: This entire set-up was just an elaborate ploy by the female android to get her boyfriend to get reformatted, so she can erase his personality and reconstruct it into a form more to her liking. In fact, this is her sixth time doing so. And you can't intervene to stop it, so she gets away with it.
- Many of the weapon stories in the game end this way. Here's a notable example:One day, a hawk lost its way in the woods. Its proud wings soon grew weak as it tried in vain to find its way home. As death approached, a songbird took pity on the hawk and did its best to offer aid.The songbird slowly nursed the hawk back to health. The beautiful sight of the small white bird nestled in the elegant wings of the hawk soon made it the envy of all the creatures in the forest.When the hawk was fully healed, it knew it was time to leave the forest. But before flying away, it promised the songbird it would one day return. In turn, the songbird gave the hawk one of its shining feathers as a token of friendship.As promised, the hawk eventually returned-but with a human in tow. "Well done," said the human. "These feathers will sell for a great price at the market." Then he slew the songbird in one blow and plucked its carcass clean.
- Donovan from Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge, the second game of the Darkstalkers series, is half vampire, having lost control of that side of him once, and hopes to win the tournament to find a way to keep it from happening again. In his ending, he finally manages to do so... Sike, he actually gives in for a second time, this time fully embracing it and becoming the villainous Dee.
- The Ninja Warriors (and its remake The Ninja Warriors Again) has your prototype ninja robots kill an evil dictator who has taken over the country using evil mutants and robots...only for your ninjas' leader to make them self-destruct to blow up the dictator's estate, and then he takes over the country with completed versions of the robot ninjas. It turns out that the new government was no better than the one you overthrew.
- Subverted in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. Right before the final battle with Jasper Batt Jr., Batt reveals to Travis that Henry, Shinobu, and Sylvia were all brutally killed off by having some Mooks deliver him their severed heads on platters. And then right before Batt goes all One-Winged Angel, Henry shows up...and reveals that the heads were just very good replicas. And then Sylvia saves Travis from his fall from the top of Pizza Batt tower. Shinobu is nowhere to be seen, but she later turns up alive and well in the sequel.
- The final book of Odin Sphere, Armageddon, is just the whole story going completely and utterly pear-shaped after everybody's personal stories wrapped up nicely. Even if you win and get the Good Ending, it's still extremely bittersweet.
- In Prince of Persia (2008), Elika is sworn to keep Eldritch Abomination Ahriman contained in his prison. Her father trades his soul for Elika's life and releases Ahriman, which you and Elika spend the entire game undoing. When Elika dies during the final boss fight, the Prince (read: YOU) resurrects her (sans deal with Ahriman, but still releasing him) after Elika explicitly told you not to.
- The Golden Ending of Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Battle Pentagram: Madoka, Sayaka, Mami, and Kyoko all help Homura defeat Walpurgisnacht, and they all survive. Then The Stinger reveals it was All Just a Dream Homura had before the events of Rebellion. Things go downhill from there.
- Pylons: Near the end of the game, when the pylons have come to life and the workers are chasing the Player Character down, we're informed it's because the noise frequency is summoning the Mettle Mother. You're given a frequency scrambler that will mess up the noise and send them all packing, and you place it on top of the radio tower to get the best chance... then you find out that doing so actually SUMMONED the Mettle Mother.
- The ending of RayStorm, particularly on 13-Ship Mode in its stinger, reveals that not only did you succeed in squashing the Secilian rebellion and sent the entire space colony of Secilia plummeting towards certain doom leaving what remains of its population to die, but that Earth, all R-GRAY craft, and the entire R-GRAY development team have all been wiped away too! Absolutely nothing hints at this, by the way.
- Red Dead Redemption provides what is essentially a cruel twist epilogue. The main story ends with John making a valiant Last Stand against the corrupt lawman who had been pulling his strings all game long, dying in a hail of gunfire in order to give his wife and son enough time to escape their doomed ranch. It's cruel, to be sure, but not exactly a twist given that John repeatedly acknowledges that he's led a life that would likely result in just such an end. He accepts this fate throughout the story on the hope that no matter what happens to him, he'll be able to secure a safe and prosperous life for his family and ensure that his son grows up to be a better man than John himself. But after the finale mission ends, a cutscene transitions to the epilogue, set 3 years later, and shows that John's wife Abegail has died and his son Jack is a bitter, vengeful outlaw whose only remaining goal in life is to hunt down and kill the man responsible for his father's death. In spite of all of John's efforts, his family is destroyed and Jack has become everything John didn't want for him to be, essentially rendering all of his efforts throughout the story pointless.
- River City Girls does this Played for Laughs. Kyoko and Misako tear through River City, pummeling various people in the process in search of their boyfriends Kunio and Riki, who were kidnapped. The girls defeat the final boss and survive a crash landing to find Kunio and Riki at the spa the girls crash landed at. They were never kidnapped, they were there the entire time. Even more, the boys are dismissive of the girls. Turns out that, surprise, Kyoko and Misako are Clingy Jealous EX-Girlfriends! Subverted in the alternate ending added in a patch, where Riki and Kunio instead ask the girls out for burgers.
- At the end of Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf, just when both you and Ralph think he won and finally got himself a sheep, not only did it turn out that it was actually Sam disguised as a sheep, preparing to punch Ralph once more, but it also all turns out to be just a dream, and he has to return to the routine of unsuccessfully trying to steal sheep from Sam. He's visibly unhappy about it.
- In the Adrift game The Sisters, you play through the entire game only to find out that your character is a murderer, and the girl who kills you during the ending is actually the ghost of your victim getting revenge.
- At the end of Soldier of Fortune: Payback, Alena Petrova hits you with a fire extinguisher and steals the secret device you just recovered. Apparently, she was The Mole of another terrorist group. The Shop intercepts a conversation between her, some unknown person, and the Not Quite Dead Moor, but the signal is lost midway. It is doubtful that this cliffhanger will be resolved, due to the game's poor reception and performance. Or maybe it was meant to be Left Hanging.
- Star Wars: The Force Unleashed's dark side endings are this.
- The first game has Starkiller killing Darth Vader and trying to kill Darth Sidious, but the Emperor crushes Starkiller with the ship his Love Interest is flying, while he sees all the corpses of the rebel leaders. Starkiller survives but is turned into a new servant of the Emperor much like Vader was with life-sustaining Sith Stalker armor. This leads to the DLC Alternate Timeline storyline, in which Lord Starkiller takes part in events seen in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, killing Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi and corrupting Luke Skywalker into joining The Dark Side, implying he's going to train him to kill the Emperor, much like Vader supposedly intended with him.
- In the second game Starkiller is killed by a dark-side clone of himself who was apparently invisible and observing the battle with Vader all along. Juno Eclipse, Kota and most of the rebel fleet are killed while Vader orders the dark apprentice to find and destroy the rest of the alliance. This also leads into a different Alternate Timeline storyline, in which Luke died on Hoth and the Dark Apprentice is sent to Endor, where he kills Han Solo and Chewbacca, and then confronts Leia, who due to her brother's death was the one who was trained as a Jedi instead. Despite this, she is killed too. And the Emperor reveals he is aware of Vader's secret attempts to train an apprentice of his own, uses Force Lightning on him, and sends an entire fleet of Imperial ships to Endor with the purpose of killing the Apprentice. Both storylines end on something of a Cliffhanger though.
- Starshot: Space Circus Fever ends with Starshot reporting to Starcash that Virtua Circus has been severely compromised and its director Wolfgang has been captured. But as soon as Starcash leaves it turns out that Starshot was a hologram and the real one has been imprisoned offscreen at some point since the final boss fight! Cue a "The end?" screen teasing a sequel the developers didn't even intend to make. The implication is that the latter parts of the final battle after Starshot is scanned and cloned were all a simulation.
- Getting the secret ending of Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis will treat you to one of these. Not only does everything in one of the bad endings happen (the love of the hero's life sacrifices herself in order for the Big Bad of the story to be killed, and the hero inadvertently ends up killing his best friend, leading to the duke, the aforementioned best friend's father, siccing the army on him and forcing him to go into hiding), but all of that happens with the addition of the Pope renaming the hero Lanselot Tartaros. Yes, the same Lanselot Tartaros who set fire to Golyat in Tactics Ogre, revealing the entire game to be a prequel.
- Terranigma: After Ark has destroyed Dark Gaia, his light version tells him that since he was a creation of Dark Gaia, he is now doomed to vanish too, alongside his village and all his friends and family. The kicker: He only set out on his journey in the first place to keep them safe, and instead he's doomed them all.
- Throne of Darkness: The daimyo guiding you actually wants you to defeat the Dark Warlord so he can claim the immortality potion, become the next Dark Warlord, and then immediately brainwashes you and your party into his mindless zombies. Yep, you just spent the whole game becoming an Unwitting Pawn to an Evil All Along guy; that's just mean, even compared to the game by which this game is inspired.
- Trails Series:
- In Trails In the Sky FC, our heroes have beaten Colonel Richard, stopped his coup and getting him to use the Black Orbment to take the Aureole. When you're in the middle of the celebration party, Estelle leaves to go get some ice cream for herself and Joshua, and Professor Alba comes to speak with Joshua. He then reveals himself to actually be Georg Weissmann be an anguis of Ouroboros, reveals that they came too late to stop Richard to stop his unintended contribution to their plot, and then gives Joshua his fuzzy memories of his time before joining the Bright family, revealing that he was an Enforcer of Ouroboros, and that he was a mole, giving Ouroboros information about the Bright family and the Bracer guild, with Weissmann erasing his memories of doing so afterwards, leaving Joshua in a Heroic BSoD. Later that night, Joshua is preparing to leave, Estelle finds him at the gardens of Grancel Castle, intent on confessing her feelings to him, and Joshua says he's going to tell her his whole past, after which he tells her that he's going to leave and gives him his prized possession and what he calls "all that remains of his heart", his harmonica. She confesses her love to him in an attempt to get him to stay, he kisses her, but he gives her a sedative when he does and leaves as he says he's always loved her. The credits roll with Estelle remembering all of her times with Joshua. For an adventure that was incredibly lighthearted, this was a shock to say the least, and it comes right out of left field.
- In Trails of Cold Steel III, after the events of the summer festival, Class 7 is invited to the imperial palace. While there everything takes a turn for the worst. It's revealed that there is a curse in Erebonia that makes people act irrationally, and one of its victims is Ash, who is revealed to be a survivor of Hamel. Ash proceeds to shoot the emperor and is captured. Chancellor Osborne then frames this and other recent events as the work of Calvard for the sake of starting a war with them. Class VII learns that Osborne and Ouroboros are planning to enact the Great Twilight, and that another member of the class, Altina, was kidnapped to be made a sacrifice for bringing it about, and then one of the bells from Crossbell starts ringing, which transforms the Imperial Villa into the Gral of Erebos and causes monsters to start popping up all over the place in Heimdallr. The characters descend the Gral, with their friends outside fighting against all but the strongest of the antagonists in the game. We learn that Sharon has fulfilled her contract with the Reinfords and is now fighting for Ouroboros again, and that Alisa's father is not only alive, but also the leader of the Gnomes and one of the people trying to make the Great Twilight a reality. After a fight with a corrupted Holy Beast is concluded, Olivert, Toval, and Victor show up seemingly to save the day, until the airship they're in explodes. And then when Altina is about to be sacrificed, Millium sacrifices herself in her place and becomes the Sword of the End. Rean, in a blind rage and completely overtaken by his ogre power, takes the Sword and kills the Holy Beast with it, kicking off the Great Twilight. And then when he goes for Osborne, he is stopped by all of the other Awakeners in the area, which includes Osborne himself. Osborne does a Neck Lift on Rean, and then the game Smash Cuts to the credits.
- The Witch's House: In the true ending, it turns out that the player-character, Viola, is actually the witch, Ellen, who has stolen Viola's body. Everything Trying to Kill You in the house? That's Viola trying to stop Ellen and reclaim her body. In the end, Ellen-as-Viola escapes the house, gloats to the pursuing Viola-as-Ellen that she'll be Viola now, and then Viola's father shows up and shoots her-as-Ellen. Ellen then walks off with Viola's father, giggling as they leave her bloody corpse behind. Worse, even if 'Viola' had managed to stop 'Ellen', reclaiming her body would have been impossible since the spell to swap bodies required consensual trust, trust which both lacked at that point — Ellen due to never having it to begin with, and Viola as a result of Ellen's heartless betrayal.
- Some of the Multiple Endings you can reach in The YAWHG turn out this way. You can think that you've done everything right, only for something to happen right at the end that feels like it completely invalidates all you accomplished.
