Downer Ending / Video Games

"It's true what they say: the grass is always greener, and you don't really know what it is you have until it's gone, gone, gone..."

"I went through all that torture just to be given the middle-finger salute?!"

— The Angry Video Game Nerd, reviewing Kid Kool and getting the worst ending.

Downer Ending in Video Games.

Games with their own pages

• The New Order: Last Days of Europe

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WARNING: As an Ending Trope, all examples are natural spoilers so they will be unmarked! Read at your own risk! Also, many of these cases involve games with Multiple Endings, where a few of them are bad, but others are good.

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• The 11th Hour also has a "pick your poison" set of endings: if you pick Marie, she turns into Stauf and eats you alive, if you choose Robin, she has actually been turned evil and will murder you, so the only way to survive is to choose Samantha, a Bittersweet Ending, as Robin is destroyed in the burning mansion along with the Big Bad (she had irrevocably turned evil, anyway).
• The game 1213 ends with the eponymous lead character finally escaping...only to discover that what he's escaping to is an Earth seemingly completely devoid of life after the atmosphere turned completely toxic for reasons that are unclear to everyone, and he and his clone siblings — now all irredeemably insane or dead — were created specifically to seek out and contact any survivors that might exist. The game ends simply on a scene of the devastation, before there's any sign of survivors...although, in a small concession to hope, it ends before the possibility is completely eliminated, either. Worse, it is implied that the actions of the player in the first part of the series (in escaping from the quarantined part of the facility he accidentally unleashed zombies on the whole place, plus the fact that the villain took out several members of the place's leadership over the course of the game) have ensured it doesn't possibly have the resources to engineer another human capable of surviving out there, and might not even be able to sustain themselves. Worst of all, is that the last human on earth is unstable in such a way that he will not be able to remember anything for more than a week (including his identity, what's going on, and where the game took place) and is doomed to wander forever in a desolate wasteland he won't even be able to remember. And that's ignoring the hallucinations.
• 1916 - Der Unbekannte Krieg ends with the soldier managing to get out of the trenches and charge along the battlefield, only to be shot dead soon after.
• Age of Empires II:
  • The Conquerors: The Aztec campaign ends with them reduced to a Vestigial Empire whose days are numbered.
  • Rise of the Rajas: The Malay campaign ends with the Bubat Incident, where the famed hero Gajah Mada took the blame of the incident that caused the death of the Sunda royal family about to be wed with his king, and he's punished with exile out of respect of his past accomplishment. And Gajah Mada considered it a Fate Worse than Death, he's left to lament at how his own hubris costed him everything and he's no hero but a man that couldn't keep his ambitions in check.
• The normal ending for Agony (2018) is about as dark as it gets in a game about Hell: the main character escapes from Hell, but in the process, tears down the boundaries between it and Earth, meaning Inanna and Satan are now free to wreak havoc. And if that wasn't bad enough, the main character only gets to enjoy his second lease on life for all of one minute before Satan emerges from the nearby ocean and crushes him underfoot as he marches to shore.
• AI: The Somnium Files:
  • The first game has Multiple Endings, requiring you to experience all of them first in order to piece together the Jigsaw Puzzle Plot and reach the Golden Ending.
    • The penultimate ending, the Annihilation Route, in which the culprit is knocked out and captured, but every main character is killed except Pewter, Aiba, Mizuki, and Date (whose body is stolen).
    • In the Mizuki and Ota routes, you seemingly get a happy ending except with Fridge Horror later revealing that Iris is dead with her father So Sejima trapped in her dying body, and in Ota's route the killer is still on the loose as well.
    • In Iris' route, Iris dies from her brain tumor in Date's arms and the killer is never found. According to Word of God, this is the real worst ending, as in the Annihilation route, the mystery is at least solved, but in this one, the story branch curves inward because you've decided to believe the ramblings of a brain cancer patient and the story subsequently goes nowhere.
  • The sequel, AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, adds two more downer endings to the series:
    • On Ryuki's side, the Explosion route ends with Kizuna losing the use of her legs, Mizuki losing her left eye, and Date getting pinned down by rubble (and subsequently getting captured by the Big Bad and losing his memories) in the aftermath of a thermite bomb explosion, with Tearer escaping before Ryuki can arrest him. This leads Ryuki to a life of drinking himself to oblivion and constantly blaming himself for his failure. And this is the canon ending for his side.
    • On Mizuki's side, the ending for Gen and Amame's route. The discovery of the other half of Jin's body in Gen's freezer leads to Boss calling for Gen's arrest as well as Mizuki's. Amame attempts a Heroic Sacrifice to save Gen, Mizuki, and Date, but Gen takes several bullets for Amame in the process — the route ends with him dying in her arms.
• In Air Force Delta Strike, you have Jamie's ending, which is a Heroic Sacrifice, allowing the rest of the Delta Squadron to launch into space. This comes on the heels of his concerted efforts to learn jet operations just so he could join them in the space combat phase of the game.
• The 2008 Alone in the Dark game has a "pick your poison" pair of downer endings. Giving the player an option to choose which one is kind of like twisting the knife. Although the Path of Light ending may have been planned to be a Sequel Hook, the follow-up Alone in the Dark: Illumination was a sequel In Name Only and ended up killing off the franchise.
• Amnesia: The Bunker ends with Clement escaping from the bunker only to be greeted by a German patrol, so he will either be killed or spend the rest of the war as a prisoner. If you failed to take care of the Beast in the Roman Ruins, it runs off into the No Man's Land to continue its slaughter anew.
• ANNO: Mutationem: In the bad ending, Ann refuses to the trust The Consortium and attempts to defy them. Unfortunately, this prompts Ryan to recklessly attack, getting shot and killed right in front of her. Ann, succumbing to a Moment of Weakness, is taken over by Amok to try and revive him, Amok permanently takes over Ann's body, and then uses her catastrophic powers to slaughter everyone in the room and bring about total destruction on the entire world. Ryan later awakens, confused and horrified at the devastation around him, to find the outside has become a Hell on Earth with Amok free to destroy all.
• Another World (aka Out Of This World) ends with otherworldly researcher Lester Chaykin unconscious, after being injured while escaping from enemy troops. This could also wind up under No Ending or maybe a cliffhanger, since nothing is ever finalized, but Lester's alien buddy shows up to carry him off into the sky to destinations unknown, leading to the sequel. It gets more depressing in the Mega CD sequel, Heart of the Alien. Lester never gets back home and is in fact killed by one of the evil aliens, forcing Buddy to cremate Lester's body at the end.
• Activision's Apocalypse for PS1 doesn't even give you a "lesser of two evils" ending. Trey Kincaid (portrayed by Bruce Willis), after defeating the four horsemen, comes face to face with the Big Bad himself. He says "see you in hell", but before he can fire, the Rev blasts Trey with a bolt of lightning, turning him into a "demon" himself, complete with glowing Hellish Pupils. Who knows what he will unleash upon the universe.
• Arcaea: After you saw the normal ending at least once, if you use a sealed Hikari (Fatalis) partner and play "Last" without doing anything (that is, your score has to be exactly 0) and wait a while, you're given an option to "Accept Arcaea" above the usual "Refuse Fate" option. Tapping on it triggers an absolutely nasty bad ending. It reveals Tairitsu and Hikari's past, as well as Arcaea's origins, which are a whole can of worms on their own. 1,000 years after Hikari kills Tairitsu but leaves her dead, the former ascends into being a goddess of Arcaea. However, consumed by guilt and still continuing to believe that she did the right thing at the same time, she goes insane. Gone was the carefree girl who basked in joyous memories and in her place a nihilistic goddess who cares for nothing other than being alive for the sake of. Other characters, save for a few with stronger commitment to their cause, were also left to willingly render themselves catatonic and enshrouded in glass, with whatever Character Development deprived away from them because of that girl who can't move away from becoming a killer. And no, you cannot ignore this ending if you want every song, because there are two songs hidden inside it.
• The finale of the second game in the Arc the Lad series (which is more of a continuation of the first game than a sequel) has the death of Arc and Kukuru, and the utter annihilation of the world itself. Elc puts it best.
  Elc: It just makes me wonder what we were fighting for. Arc died, and for what? So we could inherit this desolate and hopeless future? We didn't stop the world from ending, we survived it.
• Armored Core is full of this, but probably the best example is in for Answer. One of the possible endings has you killing 100 million people, and when the remaining Lynx units come to take you out, you destroy them, thus leaving the biggest monster in history running amok.
• In Army Men: Sarge's War, the game ends with every green soldier except Sarge and a few other minor grunts dead. It doesn't help that most fans consider this to be the last game in the series and all others as In Name Only. "War is hell, and hell is for heroes".
• Assassin's Creed:
  • The ending of Assassin's Creed III. Earth may have been saved from the worst of the solar flare damage, but Juno and others like her have been released into the world with the desire to enslave all of humanity. Oh, and Desmond, the hero, is dead, forced to choose between this future and one even worse (a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which he brings the survivors back with the words of peace and warning, only for the words to be twisted into a Religion of Evil by his successors). Additionally, Connor's ending is also at the very least bittersweet. His mentor, Achilles Davenport, is dead. His people have been forced off their land by the new American government, which has utterly forgotten Connor's contribution to the Revolution. In the epilogue, Connor also notes that, while the British may have been driven off, there is still plenty of injustice (e.g. slavery) in these lands. There are also the words that keep haunting Connor no matter what he does:
  Connor: It is not enough!
  Several characters: It never is.
  • In Assassin's Creed Syndicate the story ends happily for the historical characters since they recover the Macguffin, decide that No Man Should Have This Power, and put it back where they found it. However, the modern characters then try to retrieve the same artefact based on the recovered information, attempt to keep it out of the hands of their enemies, fail, and sustain serious casualties in the process. Everything the player did was pointless.
• Assault Shell: The Void Arrange mode has this for the Type Sigma fighter. Whereas completing this mode with any of the other four ships results in a good ending where your copilot is removed from the Psycho Frame and is allowed to live a normal life with you, here, it's revealed that your combat data was being used for the mass production of millions of Psycho Frames, and that JOKER was using you for world domination all along, as Suzy performs a soul-stealing kiss on you as the last thing needed to power these frames.
• Astra Hunter Zosma: If Zosma either fails to collect treasure or collects too little, he'll continue to fail as an Astra Hunter and the legacy of the Crescent Moon Tower bosses will be lost forever.
• Baldur's Gate III:
  • If the Player Character makes the Last-Second Ending Choice to Take Over the World, not only do they immediately become Drunk on the Dark Side and become an Evil Overlord but they also reduce their True Companions to mindless thralls. If playing as an evil Dark Urge it's even worse as the world is now in the hands of an Omnicidal Maniac.
  • Dark Urge can even corrupt the good ending. If you fail to turn on Bhaal and don't kill yourself to escape his punishment, Dark Urge becomes a possessed lunatic trapped in his own body and goes to murder his former companions at the party.
• Zigzagged in Bayonetta. You defeat the one which caused the extinction of your clan, only to put in motion his plan and let the titular heroine be caught and use her to start The End of the World as We Know It. Then Jeanne, who was left for dead, pops up out of nowhere with a motorcycle and rides it up rockets and starships in order to reach outer space. When you defeat the Big Bad Evil God and punch her soul into the sun, her corpse starts to plummet towards Earth. Jeanne again appears out of nowhere, cheers up the protagonist, and the two witches proceed to smash the Big Bad's corpse into bits before it does any damage. THEN the two must make it through re-entry. Next, we see the funeral of the titular character. Only to have her break through the tomb and start kicking ass, AGAIN. This is the ending that sticks with Bayonetta going on to further adventures, so ultimately the Downer Ending is averted.
• Three cartoon shorts were created for Chapter 3 of Bendy and the Ink Machine. None of them really have a happy ending for Bendy, but the one that really qualifies as a Downer Ending is ""Snow Sillies." Just as Bendy makes a new friend in the form of a living snowman, it melts a moment later. Boris then eats the carrot nose, and Bendy starts crying. That's where it ends.
• Betrayal at Krondor: The destruction of the world is prevented once again, but only at the cost of Gorath's life. The murderous leaders Delekhan and Moraeulf are dead as well, but Narab is still at large, and the moredhel are driven back to the Northlands, but after the Great Uprising failed to teach them that warfare isn't the answer, how can one expect them to learn now? Gorath's ultimate goal had been to turn his people into something better than the bloodthirsty savages they had become, but in the end, his cause died with him and his sacrifices have been in vain.
• In The Binding of Isaac, the ending where you defeat Satan in Sheol has your character climbing into a chest and locking himself in.
  • The ending after defeating Isaac in Cathedral where Isaac reads an ambiguous book that is likely a bible, sees in the mirror that he is actually demonic, and gazes sadly at the chest which brought him home.
  • A later ending, after defeating ??? in The Chest, wherein a series of photographs within the chest reveal the story of Isaac's lifetime, going through the loss of his sister (or possibly Isaac dressing up, it's not clear if the character in question is Isaac or not), his parents' divorce, and his mother's wrath, before depicting his own corruption.
  • The remake adds two more endings, which makes things even worse. The ending where you defeat The Lamb in The Dark Room shows that Isaac has gone missing and that Mom is frantically searching for him.
  • The second ending manages to outdo the first. In it, achievable by defeating Mega Satan in either The Chest or The Dark Room, Isaac is shown slowly dying in a chest, shifting between a human and demon form. As he spends less time in human form, he starts whimpering and his heartbeat goes up. Then, he goes to demon form and stays there, with his heart stopping and his whimpering replaced by growling.
  • Ending 20, the "Final ending", added in Afterbirth+, is a brutal Mind Screwdriver that somehow manages to top all the above. It goes through the above, Once More, with Clarity, confirming beyond doubt that Isaac did climb into an airtight chest and suffocated to death, the entire game throughout all its endings was his Dying Dream, and Isaac's mother found him too late. He wasn't the antichrist, he wasn't chased into a hellish labyrinth of a basement, and his mother might not have even been abusive. He was just a kid who blamed himself for his parents' failed marriage, went insane, and viewed himself as a demon, leading to his suicide.
  • Repentance adds two more endings. Ending 21, where Isaac unsuccessfully tries to hide a drawing of the boss Mother, causing his actual mother to lock him in a closet, leaving him to hyperventilate as a statue of Satan appears behind him. This is likely the origin story of the Tainted Characters.
  • Ending 22, however, notably averts this by giving an unambigously happy ending. After The Beast is defeated, it's revealed that the events were all just a bedtime story he was writing along with his dad, who suggests a happier ending, and then the intro story is retold, with a few differences. The first one being that Isaac's parents are together. Even if taken with previous endings with Isaac dying, it at least means he has finally left behind all self-blame he had for a situation he had no fault in, and moved on to a Heaven of his liking.
    The Narrator a.k.a. Isaac's father: Isaac and his parents lived in a small house on top of a hill...
• Two of the three endings to BioShock have the protagonist slaughter the Little Sisters and lead an army of splicers to take over the surface world. Likewise, it applies for two of the four endings to BioShock 2, where the protagonist turns Eleanor Lamb into a bloody, cynical monster who only cares about her own survival at the costs of others' lives.
• BlazBlue.
  • The character-specific story modes all have bad endings which usually result with the character dying or suffering a Fate Worse than Death, or the bad guys achieving their objectives, or the character otherwise being put in a hopeless situation. Fortunately, thanks to the "Groundhog Day" Loop, the bad endings don't stick. The Canon endings as well, for both games:
  • The first game, Calamity Trigger, ends with all characters failing to make much of a difference in Rachel and Hazama's Cosmic Chess Game. The only exception to this is Arakune and Bang, but they're not in much place to change much to begin with.
  • The arcade mode for Continuum Shift results in Hazama successfully transforming Noel Vermillion into Mu-12. You need to play the home console version to get the rest of the plot.
  • The story mode ending for Continuum Shift reveals that Mu-12 was just a distraction to keep the main characters busy from Hazama's real goal: the destruction of Takamagahara, which he succeeds in. In other words, Hazama manages to escape alive with all his goals successfully completed. This sets up the events of the third game, Chronophantasma.
• In Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, the canonical evil ending has Kain refuse to sacrifice himself and instead reign over the decaying landscape with plans to thin out the rest of humanity. This leads into all the sequels.
• The second BloodRayne game ends on a very bleak note despite the protagonist prevailing over the villains: though Rayne has succeeded in killing Kagan and avenging the deaths of her human mother, family and foster father, the damage Kagan and his minions have wrought on the world is irreversible, with the skies being covered by a toxic substance that allows vampires to survive in daylight and causes human civilization's downfall. Plus there are other vampire lords that are eager to fill out the Evil Power Vacuum left by Kagan's death, and the Brimstone Society has declared war against all vampirekind, regardless of if they are evil or not. Rayne now inherits Kagan's empire (something she loathes) and will be forced to fight a war on two fronts in a ruined world. This was presumed to be a Sequel Hook, but a follow up was never made due to the death of the creator.
• In Border Down, the only difference between the 6-D ending and the level 6 Nonstandard Game Over is Frank's brain got fried by the RAIN system and left in a vegetative state. 6-C is a little more hopeful; Frank's at least somewhat back in a properly conscious state, although the immediate terraforming is emphatically not going to work out. Also, it seems Frank's willing to give RAIN another go. Considering that he successfully wiped out the Earth conspirators' own version of Antares, and he has a better grip of what RAIN does… the question is whether the conspirators can still control RAIN's output.
• In Boss Fight The Game, the game ends with Sir Labo, the protagonist, taking over the kingdom. However, he is overthrown a few weeks later, and according to the future that Doggosmoke shows you, Doggo Industries will eventually take over the kingdom and leave it a polluted wasteland.
• Brave Story: New Traveler kinda has a downer ending too. Sure, you save the girl from a evil, strangely hot-looking, half-naked, super emo, top-half-sticking-out-of-a-giant-toad's-mouth goddess, but in the end, the whole of the land you just visited was all an illusion, your new friends will soon disappear into nothingness, and you yourself will eventually forget the entire journey.
• The Breach: Sergei destroys the Hermes and the Yellow's connection to our dimension with it, and makes it back to Earth. But he's blamed for the deaths of the entire crew and locked in an insane asylum, desperately trying to convince a psychiatrist that he hasn't lost his mind and that humanity is doomed if the SW-JUMP project continues. Then it turns out Sergei was infected by the Yellow when he turns into a monster and attacks the psychiatrist.
• Breath of Fire:
  • Breath of Fire II's "bad ending"; the one you get if you can't activate the machinery underneath your city. Which you can't get if you let the old man in the Eye Machine die. The old man just happens to be protagonist Ryu's father. In it, Ryu takes his mother's place as the living seal to the Dragon World. He has to take her place because she literally gave her life to open the gate to let your party go after the BBEG. BoF2 rivals Terranigma as the biggest continuous downer game in Nintendo history.
  • Breath of Fire IV gives you the option of merging back together with Fou-Lou, which results in Ryu killing his friends, turning into a massive dragon, and then leaving with the implication of ridding the earth of humanity.
• Bubble Bobble has a really bad downer ending if you beat the game with just 1 player. The girl that you are going to rescue will vanish, leaving you alone with a caption that reads: "Sad End! This is not a true ending! Try this again with a friend!" No Ending Credits is shown. And in the NES port, if you do manage to beat the game with a second player, the game gives you another bad ending anyways: It turns out that the only way to get any sort of good ending out of Bubble Bobble is to both go through the Bonus Dungeon and finish the game with two players. Thankfully, having two players is enough for the good ending in the arcade version, as well as most of the other ports.
• Call of Duty:
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare ends the Prologue Act with the player in the shoes of President Al-Fulani, watching his nation collapse all around him as he's dragged off to be executed. Act I ends with the player-controlled side character's helicopter getting caught in the blast radius of a nuke bomb detonation; the player survives the crash long enough to stand up several times, painfully crawl to the downed helo exit ramp, and then die. And in the final mission, every single member of the player's squad (as the main character) except the CO is executed while wounded and unable to retaliate. It's even worse because all of these guys had just saved the world and reinforcements are literally seconds away from saving the day.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 manages to make it worse. In the midst of a war initially generated by Makarov and his men, after countless trials and a bitter struggle to reach Shepherd, the true main antagonist after he betrays Makarov, he finally reveals his motivation — as the commander of all US forces, with the Russians having already invaded the US, and with his status as a war hero secured as, to almost everyone, the man who brought Makarov down, he reveals that he attempted to galvanize the USA into fighting with force — and succeeded. The only thing killing him does is disallow him from seeing the end results of his already complete scheme. That, and Soap and Price are fugitives, and with the USA in a fervor despite its military lacking a commander, it and Russia are going full pelt towards a cataclysmic war the likes of which the world has never seen. There's also the two player characters who die while the player can do nothing about it.
  • By the end of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, the entire East Coast of the USA has been ravaged by a Russian invasion, with Washington DC having been hit by an EMP. Every single capital and major city in Europe was hit by a poison gas attack, invaded, or gassed then invaded, leaving tens of millions dead there. The Russians have suffered massive casualties. All but three of the series' player characters are dead, with two of them MIA. The world economy is in shambles, as several of the major financial centers are wrecked. The only consolation is that Makarov is dead and peace has broken out, but for how long?
  • In the ending of Call of Duty: Ghosts, despite everyone’s best efforts, Rorke’s complete invincibility allows him to capture Logan and drag him away to torture and convert. This was intended for a sequel, but due to poor sales, this was where the story ended, meaning Rorke will never, ever be defeated by anyone.
• Either ending for Captive Audience. Matt finds out that everything he had done for the past few nights was part of the real TV show he was kidnapped and forced to participate in. He also finds out that Stacy was actually part of the TV show and she was there only to offer emotional support for him. Also, depending on whether he chose to save her or not, Julia could feel betrayed by Matt for not choosing to save her on the fourth day’s Sadistic Choice. To rub more salt in the wounds for Matt, the show has decided to give him five more seasons, meaning that he will spend five more years in captivity away from Julia. To add the extra cherry on top, the game concludes with Julia receiving the same message Matt got on the first night, meaning she’ll experience the same thing as Matt, fruitlessly trying to escape and reunite with her love all for the sake of someone’s twisted entertainment.

• The Castlevania series' bad endings:
  • In one of the endings to Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, the narration says that killing Dracula a second time wasn't enough to save Simon, and that Simon died from the curse.
  • In the SNES version of Dracula X, Vampire's Kiss, Richter heads into Dracula's castle to rescue his girlfriend Annet and her sister Maria. Rescuing them requires going into two separate hidden areas. If you fail to rescue them, at the end of the game, Richter will be shown walking away from the castle alone. This is made more poignant by the fact that if you failed to rescue Annet, she was transformed into a monster and you had to kill her...
  • In Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, if you defeat Maxim in Castle B, but without the JB and MK Bracelets equipped, Maxim and Lydie both die. This is in contrast to the best ending, where Maxim and Lydie both live to tell the story, except Juste's opposed to telling the story to Lydie. The normal ending for defeating Maxim in Castle A is somewhere between this and Bittersweet Ending; Maxim dies but Lydie lives.
  • In Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, the Bad Ending essentially has Julius coming in to fight Soma, who is now the dark lord. Either Soma dies or the dark lord wins, and neither outcome is pleasant.
  • The Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow bad end is possibly one of the worst: Despite overcoming his Superpowered Evil Side the first time in Aria, Soma could succumb to his dark side by failing to hold onto a Love Token Mina gives him, making it a very, very cruel and ironic ending considering the circumstances.
  • In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the bad ending triggered by simply killing the brainwashed Richter. There are two variations of this, depending on whether or not Alucard met up with Maria at the center of the castle. Had he done so, what results is Maria appearing quite heartbroken after learning of Richter's fate, with Alucard filled with self-doubt about what he had to do. If he did not, however, Maria is left completely absent, with Alucard reflecting and lamenting on what little he knew about Richter, even going so far as to compare the Belmont's apparent behavior to that of Dracula. Given that even in the worst endings for most of the franchise, Castlevania itself is destroyed, what are the chances that Maria's absence if Alucard never met up with her in the center of the castle is because she never managed to escape from there prior to its destruction? For bonus points, unused voice clips on the disc suggest that an even worse ending was cut, one in which Maria turned into a monster and Alucard had to kill them both, without ever figuring out who was behind it.
  • Castlevania: Lords of Shadow ends with Gabriel Belmont failing to save his childhood love from the dead in spite of having saved the world from the darkness, leaving all his efforts to turn into nothing. He also unwillingly becomes Dracula in the end, forever separating him from her in spite of still maintaining his own bitter sanity for the following 1000 years.
• Catherine:
  • The Bad Cheater ending. Vincent loses both women, his friends think he's crazy, and then he gets hit by a truck.
  • If you manage to clear the extremely difficult final levels of the inner arcade game Rapunzel (or Super Rapunzel) to rescue the princess from the hag's tower, the hag's final spiteful move is to swap bodies with the princess. The hero then has to choose between marrying the beautiful young woman who's now actually the hag, or rescuing the actual princess but being married to someone who looks like a hag.
• In the PC Engine version of Chase H.Q., if you clear the fifth stage with a score lower than 5000000 points, you won't be able to access at the sixth and final mission and you will recive a mock-up ending where commisary tells that: You have done well. But it's not over yet. You still have to fight to keep the peace of citizen. After you press start, you will be sent back to the first stage to retry the enitre mission.
• In both the Playstation and DS re-releases of Chrono Trigger, an additional cutscene was added post-credits in which, despite saving the entire world, the heroes' home kingdom is burned to the ground and the citizens are killed. The whereabouts of the heroes is left ambiguous. The sequel, Chrono Cross, implies they were also killed, as they are only seen as ghosts. To top it off, some of the characters you can play as are implied to have had a role in the incident.
• In Chrono Cross, the Dragon god ending is stunningly bleak; it implies that the dragon god, in alliance with the demi-humans and dwarves, killed all the humans on El Nido, Serge and friends included. The game ends showing Harle walk through Serge's hometown, being looted and occupied by the non-humans, as she stops at the grave his alternate-self had been buried at. She lays flowers at his grave and says farewell, cue credits.
• Chzo Mythos:
  • In 7 Days a Skeptic, the Player Character turns out to be an impostor who killed a man and took his identity to fulfill the dream of being in space. As if that wasn't disturbing enough, he gets arrested for 6 murders, 5 of which (those of his crewmates) he didn't commit.
  • In 6 Days a Sacrifice, not only is it revealed that the protagonist of 7 Days ended up as Destiny's slave, the player character of that game kills the woman he's in love with (who had been possessed by John DeFoe during the sex scene, implying that you had killed John DeFoe), then becomes fused with John DeFoe's ghost to become Chzo's new Prince. On the plus, he was already dead. The fact that Chzo actually won in the end is a shocker in itself, too.
• Clarence's Big Chance's worst endings. The girl is repulsed by Clarence and leaves him. A depressed Clarence loses his will to continue chasing girls and either spends the rest of his days as a Basement-Dweller with the internet as his only companion or bungles a suicide attempt and lives out the rest of his life in an underwater civilization comprised of society's rejects.
• Clock Tower:
  • The First Fear. Sure, Jennifer survived, but her three friends are all dead, and she's very nearly lost her sanity.
  • The sequel is bad too. Jennifer is adopted by Helen and goes under therapy, only for Scissorman to attack her again. In three of the endings, she fails to defeat Scissorman and dies, in one she kills him but dies in the process, and in one she kills him and survives. Even in the good ending, Scissorman has still killed some of the people she knew. Helen's endings are no better, as there are four endings in which she dies and Scissorman lives, and only one where he is defeated and she survives.
  • Clock Tower: The Struggle Within: The game has 13 endings, 12 of which are more or less just Nonstandard Game Overs. In the best ending, Alyssa survives, but Ashley Tate, a close friend of yours? Turned into a monster and was killed by her father, also a close friend of your family, who goes insane and gets killed later on. The mysterious woman Alyssa meets a few times throughout the story? Turns out she is your sister, but unfortunately, she commits suicide in front of your eyes right before the revelation. Your father? Turns out he isn't your real father. Your real father buried you alive because you were possessed, and this guy dug you up to take revenge. Oh, and he dies, of course. Your real father? Turns out he is the main slasher villain of the game. And yes, he dies too. The policeman you befriend throughout the game? He actually survives, but he prefers to stop the zombie apocalypse over your company. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, but there's a Zombie Apocalypse now, and you're still possessed.
  • In First Fear's "S" Ending, Jennifer and one of her friends get to live this time. However, it is still a bit of a downer, since Lotte is Jennifer's best friend, and she can't survive no matter the circumstances, and that ending isn't canonical anyway.
• The Command & Conquer series is quite actually prone to this.
  • In Tiberian Dawn, even if GDI wins (which is the canonical ending), the world is still devastated from the war, and Tiberium infestation will only grow into the years ahead. The Nod ending could be seen as the intro before the GDI campaign — and no matter what, something in the world is getting levelled by that Ion Cannon.
  • Red Alert is even worse. Soviets ending — they control all of Europe, only for you to become Premier by assassination from a familiar figure. Allies win, they comb through Moscow, with General Stavros personally crushing Stalin with large debris.
  • Red Alert 2's Soviet ending is downer in a way. You are Premier of the world, but Yuri still apparently lives. Yuri's Revenge has a crapsack beginning, but not end.
  • Surprisingly, the canon ending to another installment, Tiberian Twilight, averts this. While there will be losers in the struggle, the Earth, which seemed on the brink of succumbing to Tiberium, is still a mess, but with the uneasy cooperation between the GDI and Kane (who eventually leaves the Earth on his own terms), Humanity regains control, and Earth now has a fighting chance again.
• Condemned
  • Condemned: Criminal Origins ends with Ethan Thomas managing to defeat the apparent source of the city's madness (a demon-ish entity with lots of metal implanted in its skin); but as he and Malcolm are driving away, Ethan realizes that Malcolm's nephew, Leland aka SKX, is still alive and locked up in the back of Malcolm's car. Ethan can either choose to take his revenge on SKX for ruining his life or have mercy; but SKX does take a bullet on his head, while more of the metallic freaks are seen. Ethan is seen later at a diner, his life still ruined, the one person he trusts admitting to wearing a wire, and apparently transforming into one of the freaks.
  • Condemned 2: Bloodshot ends on a higher note, but still a pretty ominous one. Ethan, a burned-out alcoholic, manages to defeat the Oro, the cult that apparently included the metal-jawed demonish guys from the first game. He and two friends escape, and apparently all is happy. Except it's revealed that the President of the United States is a member of the Oro. And SKX? He survived his gunshot, killed his Uncle, and is accepted into Oro-dom, including all that cool metal dentistry.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day ends with Conker as king of the land...but he's gone through hell, he's Surrounded by Idiots, and his girlfriend got killed in front of him. The last shot of the game, same as the first, shows him seated on the throne, looking deeply irritated, as somber music plays on the soundtrack. What makes it worse was that earlier, Conker had an opportunity to wish Berri back to life, but forgot to, completely squandering his one and only chance at a happy ending. Which still isn't as bad as the ending that was originally planned, where Conker commits suicide.
• Corpse Party:
  • The first game has anywhere from two to seven bad endings per chapter, in which one or more scared teenagers die in increasingly terrifying and gruesome ways in a haunted school possessed by evil spirits. And even the true end isn't particularly happy: out of all the people who started out in Heavenly Host, only five of them can make it out, all of whom are horribly scarred from their experiences, while the Big Bad is still out there.
  • The sequel, Book of Shadows, manages to make it even more of a downer: the game is made up mostly of alternate timelines from the main game, or of side characters having expanded storylines. And they all die. The sections that do take place in the present involve the main characters taking actions that make their lives even worse.
• CyberGames ends with your character becoming champion of the eponymous Blood Sport, only for the resident sponsoring MegaCorp to collect on their contract and, in order to find out just what makes you so good, repossess your body and have you dissected. Have a nice day!
• Cyberpunk 2077 has several endings, none of which are completely happy, but one is much worse: you can have V decide that saving him/herself isn't worth having other people die, and they want to experience the end with Johnny rather than a slow breakdown; so they sit back, look over the city, and shoot themselves in the head. Afterwards, their former friends are so devastated that they continue to leave V voicemail messages.
  • The variant of "The Devil" ending where V chooses to live out what's left of his or her life is also this: By siding with Arasaka to save themselves they've betrayed (and also destroyed) Johnny, and burned bridges with some of their other friends...and after a bunch of tests it's determined their brain is too damaged by the Relic, giving them six months at most to live. V has nightmares of Jackie and continues to be taunted by Johnny even though he's really not there anymore, both of which hammer in that it was the absolute wrong decision. And the last thing V does before leaving the space station is breaking the bullet necklace in a fit of rage and grief...they sold their soul and went against everything and everyone they stood for, All for Nothing. To make matters worse, thanks to V's cooperation with them Arasaka is more powerful than ever.
  • Later patches added in an Earn Your Bad Ending for V's By-the-Book Cop friend River Ward. If you fail to save his nephew from the Serial Killer and River survives the misadventure, he ends up getting arrested over a bar fight with a drunk who mocked the victims and begs V to bail him out during the credits.
• Darkest Dungeon: "Victory...A hollow and ridiculous notion." The heir and their army successfully purge the monstrosities from several of the the most fucked-up dungeons they've ever seen, though the heir is forced to sacrifice half their party to finish the Eldritch Abomination hiding in the center of the Earth you've accidentally been feeding with the dead left in your wake...only to find the devastating truth: Mankind is and always was an errant protrusion of flesh of said Eldritch Abomination, and our rotting corpses will continue to revive and sustain our creator after our deaths, meaning it can never be killed as long we exist. One day, inevitably, When the Planets Align, what sleeps will rouse once more to hatch from this fragile shell of earth and rock and bring about our inescapable end. Broken and psychotic, the heir commits suicide as their forefathers before them, and haunts the estate as another ghost, pointlessly trying to stop the next heir from starting this Eternal Recurrence again. "Ruin has come to our family," wrote the Ancestor, but the family in question is the whole of mankind.
• The Darkness ends with Jackie killing his Uncle Paulie for Jenny's death, but by doing so, the titular entity has taken him over completely. There's worse to come in the sequel when Jackie goes to Hell to save Jenny's soul from the Darkness. But in doing so, the Angelus has taken her over and leaves him and the Darkness behind. Way to go, Jackie.
• The Dark Parables usually have Happy Endings, which makes sense for a game series based on classic fairy tales. However, the bonus chapter of the twelfth game, The Thief and the Tinderbox, is this. Kai, having been entrusted with the eponymous magical tinderbox, has dreams of an island at the Edge of the World where it can be hidden away and no one will ever use its magic for evil again, so he sets out on a major expedition. Not only is everyone else on his ship killed by a vicious sea monster, but he himself becomes imprisoned on the island, forced to stay there for eternity as guardian of the various magic artifacts it conceals.
• Dark Souls as a whole ends with a very grim You Can't Fight Fate scenario; despite almost every single character sacrificing themselves or what they had to stop it, the Age of Fire will inevitably end, the Dark will come and leave the world barren and dead in shadows no matter who does what, and it's a vicious cycle that has happened for millennia and will keep happening. Gwyn sacrificed himself by burning in the Kiln even after going Hollow. Vendrick, Aldia and the Bearer of the Curse tried their best to find a solution to break the cycle. And Gael resurrected the Dark Soul of Man to create a Painted World for life to retreat to. And none of this could stop the end of the world happening on loop. The only spark of hope is in the endings of Dark Souls III where you finally find a way to break the cycle and forge a future for mankind.
• The campaign in the original Dawn of War ends with the Blood Ravens Imperial Space Marines and their Eldar allies victorious over Sindri Myr and the Alpha Legion Chaos Space Marines, only to have Blood Ravens Captain Gabriel Angelos smash the stone imprisoning the demon lord in the belief that this would destroy the demon forever. Only to learn, of course, that because so much blood had been shed in the war for Tartarus, the demon had actually been set free by smashing the stone. Since this is a Warhammer 40,000 game, this is hardly surprising.
• The Dead Mines: The player character is sent into a mine leaking toxic gas, with the goal of sealing the burst pipes. He succeeds, but succumbs to the gas.
• Dead Space:
  • In the finale of the first game, it's revealed that Isaac's girlfriend had been dead (committed suicide to apparently avoid death via necromorph) since before the game began; and he was hallucinating her presence all the time. After finally managing to kill the hive mind and narrowly escape, Isaac replays Nicole's message and turns it off prior to her suicide. He's then attacked by undead Nicole (though this too was an hallucination, per Word of God). So the hero's dead or mad on the edge of space, the marker that was keeping the necromorphs at bay is apparently destroyed, and the Ishimura remains drifting in space, full of necromorphs (the kicker is that the Ishimura would've been destroyed, had it not been for Isaac fixing it). The real downer (and something most people forget) is the fact that the marker isn't the original marker. The marker in the game is one created by the Earth government from one discovered on Earth. So, even if Isaac had somehow been able to completely destroy the hive mind, all the necromorphs, and the marker itself, there would still be the original and maybe even more copies.
  • Dead Space: Extraction similarly ends on an ambiguous Downer Ending. McNeill, Weller, and Murdoch escape from the Ishimura, but at the end one of the characters (it's not shown who) turns into a Necromorph and attacks Murdoch. Dead Space 2: Severed eventually answered which one turned into a Necromorph with the return of only Weller and Murdoch. But then at the end of Severed, Weller is hit with a grenade and sacrifices himself to open the bay doors to let Murdoch escape.
  • Dead Space 3: Awakened has the first hopeful ending in the franchise, with Isaac appearing to sacrifice himself to stop the Moon from completing. While Awakened shows that he and Carver survived, the rest of the Brother Moons have awakened, and they fail to stop them or get ahead of them to Earth, and they've already begun to attack the planet, ending with one of the Brethren Moons looming over their ship before the credits roll.
• Considering that it's a Gorn-filled Exploitation Game, Demonophobia ends this way. Sakuri is left stranded in Hell, with absolutely nothing left on her, repeatedly dying over and over again until the universe ends... which won't happen for a very long time. Meanwhile, Ritz, the one who brought her into this mess in the first place, gets away with everything and is last seen sweet-talking yet another poor bastard.
• Deltatraveler fully uses this trope during its Earthbound section. If you play the game's Obliteration Route, then by now, not only have you murdered most of Carpainter's cult, including Mr. Carpainter himself, to achieve this ending fully, you have to murder Ness and Paula, Paula being your party member in any other route, in cold blood. The game rightfully calls you out for this in the newly released chapter.
• Detroit: Become Human has 99 possible endings varying from optimistic to depressing, but one of the biggest downers involves Marcus setting off a dirty bomb in the city, forcing all the surviving humans to evacuate and triggering a Robot War.
• Deus Ex Universe:
  • All of the endings in Deus Ex: Invisible War are downers to some degree. Either all of humanity link up with the AI Helios and give him a Borg-like Hive Mind, a perfect democracy at the cost of the individual self (Bittersweet Ending), the Illuminati take over the world, the Templars wipe out all biomodification and create an oppressive theocratic world government, or humanity fights itself to extinction, leaving only the Omar cyborg race.
  • The endings in Deus Ex: Human Revolution are all downer endings by analysis. They all seem like they could lead to a better future for humanity: You could choose Darrow's option of telling the whole truth, thus getting the world to all but stop pursuing science and technology, and instead focus on their humanity and morals. You could choose Sarif's option of blaming the whole thing on Purity First and the anti-aug protesters, thus allowing humans to "steal fire from the gods," and by extension, become gods ourselves. You could choose Taggart's option of not revealing anything to the public, allowing the world to be run carefully and responsibly by trustworthy people unseen. Or you could simply blow up Panchea, killing Sarif, Darrow, Taggart, and yourself in the process, and leaving humanity to make their own choices. These all sound like perfectly good endings. That is, until you remember that Human Revolution is a prequel to the Crapsack World of Deus Ex. It doesn't actually matter which ending you choose, since the world ends up going to hell anyway.
• If you choose to heed Yuzu's idea in Devil Survivor, you doom the whole world. "And the only angels that could have prevented this...were killed by your own hands"
  • Even Yuzu's ending is still better than the one you get should you follow Honda's advice and escape on day 6. Divine Wrath Falls, Everyone Dies.
  • Yuzu's ending being a Downer Ending is ultimately averted in Overclocked, where her eighth day allows the characters to fix up their mess and earn their happy ending...or you could screw up even harder, resulting in an imperfect sealing of the demons' world by killing the only deities that can accomplish it instead of helping them, plus being unable to stop it by becoming the King of Bel due to Jezebel retreating back into the demon world. This causes the party to spend the rest of their lives trying to kill the demons that, due to the imperfect sealing, are continually assaulting the human world.
• Diablo.
  • The first game starts with the noble king being corrupted and his kingdom destroyed. Then you have to kill the undead king, plus demons are killing people, and the prince has been kidnapped. After 16 annoying levels of demon slaying, you finally make it to the boss and beat him...you find out that the kidnapped prince you were tasked to find and rescue was Diablo all this time, and you just killed him. To top it off, you became Diablo and took his place, bringing the world back to the way it was when it started and making your whole quest pointless.
  • Diablo II: Diablo is dead, yay! And then the last cinematic plays, and it turns out the being Marius was talking to the entire time was not the Archangel Tyrael, but the last Prime Evil, Baal, who just got back his own soulstone and is about to wreak havoc.
  • The Lord of Destruction expansion: Baal is dead, yay! But the worldstone is unstable and must be destroyed. Tyrael says there's no telling what will happen next. In the next game, we find out that one of the effects was that Mount Arreat has been reduced to a smoldering crater.
• Digimon Survive has a particularly nasty one. If you choose "never go back" at the turning point of Part 8 (bottom left option), Takuma will ditch Agumon and Miyuki and go back home on his own. Agumon and Miyuki are not pleased with the rejection, and the former is on the verge of sobbing when he says goodbye to his former partner. Once he goes back home, he's forever spat as the pariah who's associated with monsters, and the other survivors presumably died in the other world. The next time we see him, it's Just Before the End where it's implied that the Master is destroying both worlds through their synchronization to satisfy his centry-old grudge and Takuma had to evacuate from his home to a regufee camp as a result. Unlike Shuuji's insanity-induced abuse of Lopmon either, this is a perfectly conscious choice on his end and once the decision is made he never goes back, so it's also a chance for him to cross the Moral Event Horizon to be the Dirty Coward who doomed his friends and both worlds to an untimely end because of the coward move.
• The Disgaea series makes you work for your world-ending bad endings, but boy are they amazing.
  • Disgaea 2 actually makes you WORK for your bad ending. By default, the good ending will play wherein Rozalin, remembering her life as Zenon, will try to intimidate Adell with a lightning bolt, but Adell refuses to dodge it and takes it head on, before climbing the stairs and giving her a hug, and finally a kiss to show he trusts her. In the Worst ending, she decides to fight Adell, which leads to a True Final Boss fight with level 2000 Rozalin (compared to Fake Zenon who was level 90 about 5 minutes before this fight), and Adell kills her. This causes Adell to feel unbearably guilty, but Rozalin possesses Adell immediatelly, causing him to brutally murder his siblings (and probably Etna and Yukimaru). Credits roll with a daunting picture of a monstrous Adell in the back, while sad music plays. In order to even unlock this ending, you must a) collect 99 felonies on Adell, b), kill 100 teammates with friendly fire, c) kill Rozalin 10 times, and then d) beat the final boss. This requires an extra several tens of hours of gameplay. In contrast, to get the good ending, just beat the game normally without going out of your way to do all of that.
  • Disgaea 3: Geoffrey successfully turns Mao into an insane overlord, so that he will start tearing up the human world and become the villain of Geoffrey's story. Unfortunately, killing Beryl unlocks something DARK in Mao's heart, turning him into a Cosmic Temper Tantrum. Cue explosion of the planet.
  • Disgaea 4: Valvatorez declares war against the organization crazy enough to put a self-destruct system in every planet ever. Unfortunately, that organization is so powerful that everyone calls them "God". Cue millions of demon lords fighting the protagonists all at once.
  • Disgaea 5: If you manage to turn Killia into a teamkilling psychopath, Goldion will berate him for coming so far in martial arts only to throw it all away for a quick laugh and a killing spree, then punch him in the face until he dies. If you accidentally defeat Berserk Usalia at the stage where you first meet her, she dies and Killia crosses the Despair Event Horizon and leave the Rebel Army; no resistance means Void Dark wins. If you lose to the final boss, they'll vaporize what's left of Lieze, leaving Killia a broken wreck.
• Divine Divinity:
  • Divinity II: Ego Draconis has a major one. You fight the Big Bad… only for him to effortlessly trounce you and seal you in diamond. He then mockingly reveals that your only ally is actually his girlfriend and has been stringing you along for his plot to free himself all along. Literally everything you've done throughout the entire game was all in the villain's benefit. The villain and his girlfriend then leave you stuck in diamond to conquer the world, but not before making it so you can watch them do it. The game ends with the hero being unable to do anything but watch as the villain rules the world with an iron fist, forever, and forced to "live" with the knowledge that it's all their fault. Thankfully rectified to an extent by the expansion, Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance. You escape your prison with the help of a demon, save Aleroth from Damian's forces, kill the demon when he tries to backstab you, and finally, finally enact vengeance/justice on Ygerna, Damien's aforementioned girlfriend who strung you along like a puppet the entirety of Ego Draconis. And to top it all off, you manage to save Lucian the Divine Hero while you're at it, fully restoring the honor of your disgraced order. The only negative aspect of this is that Damien himself is still alive and scheming, none too pleased about his girlfriend's (second!) death.
  • The other games didn't exactly end well either. The first game seems happy enough in that The Divine kills the villain and saves the young child the villain was going to use for his plans, but as veterans will know, this infant would become Damien, the Big Bad of the entire series. Not only that, but the Divine's victories ultimately come to nothing as he is ultimately betrayed and murdered by the Dragons.
  • Beyond Divinity ends with the sarcastic Death Knight, your only companion and ally throughout the game, revealing that he is in fact Damien himself. Despite your best efforts, he escapes to plot his scheme for 2, leaving your character to wonder just what the hell they even managed to accomplish. The ending becomes even worse when you consider that — if certain characters in the game are to be believed — you could have saved the entire world just by dying, literally at the beginning of the game, as Damien was still soul-linked to you.
• Do It For Me: Four out of five endings have the students be killed by either of the two main characters. Only "Awake", the Golden Ending, has everyone survive.
• Several DonPachi games:
  • The plot of the first game is that you were fighting your comrades the whole time (and apparently you knew it). At the end, take a moment of silence for all those you have killed.
  • In the sequel, should you access the second loop, Colonel Longhena reveals that you were fighting your own comrades the whole time once again, and that there was never any mechanized aliens to begin with. But in slaughtering his own allies and the Commander's special forces, the player character ironically solved the problems of overpopulation, environmental pollution, and arms races. As to whether this was what the commander wanted, not even the protagonist knows.
  • Several of Dai Ou Jou's endings include Shotia's memory being deleted bit by bit until the last memories in her are of her human days and she smiles fondly of them as they go too, and Exy goes crazy and chokes her operator to death while crying blood, then goes and does things leading to Dai Fukkatsu.
  • Dai Fukkatsu has probably the worst of them all, as not only is your carrier destroyed by Colonel Longhena before the True Final Boss fight, but when you return to the present after defeating Hibachi, you find that while you had tried to prevent the Blissful Death Wars from happening, Next EXY tried to do the same by going back in time by destroying the DonPachi Corps, but she ends up causing it. Then, in the present, Longhena not only leads the war, but he also ends becoming the new leader of DonPachi as General Longhena. Because of this, the entire plot of DFK was absolutely pointless.
• It's possible to get a bad end in each of the Don't Escape games.
  • In the first one, if you fail to take precautions for the main character turning into a werewolf, he bursts free and kills a large number of villagers before being killed himself. It's also possible to have another villager get bitten, starting the cycle over again.
  • In Don't Escape 2, the main character and the two survivors you can recruit can all be torn apart by the oncoming zombie horde, sometimes including your best friend Bill.
  • In Don't Escape 3, even the best ending has the main character dying, killing themselves to remove the malevolent crystal that contaminated the ship and yourself. If you escape, you just end up inadvertently infecting another ship.
• Doom: You fight through the moon bases that the forces of Hell invaded, then fight through Hell itself, only to find that the demons have invaded Earth when you return. Plus, they killed your pet rabbit, Daisy. Doom II gives a Belated Happy Ending as Doomguy rescues what's left of humanity, sends the demons back to Hell, and then destroys Hell itself to make sure they never come back.
• Doshin the Giant, surprisingly. The islanders construct the Tower of Babel, which blocks out the sun and causes the island to break apart. Doshin holds the tower up long enough to let the humans run, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere for them to go, and the entire island sinks into the sea while Sodoru contemplates the fact that he is dying. In the end, Doshin falls face-down dead into the water and becomes a new island.
• Dragon Age II, which somehow manages to be even Darker and Edgier than the first game, takes this trope and rides it off a cliff. In the last hour or so of the game, the real plot kicks in, in which there's a massive escalation of the game-long tensions between Kirkwall's mages and their Templar oppressors. Both sides are hopelessly corrupt and have a batshit crazy leader, despite a handful of good people in the rank and file. No matter what you do, any parties that could help settle the dispute peacefully are systematically eliminated, the final straw being Grand Cleric Elthina's assassination by Anders when he blows up the Chantry. Regardless of which side Hawke picks, s/he will be betrayed by Anders, and the game will end in a continent-wide war between the mages and the Templars. Hawke goes on the lam, eventually separated from all his/her friends (except the love interest, if any), and has disappeared along with the Warden from Origins. Loose threads insinuate that Ferelden is on the cusp of another war with Orlais after being weakened by the Blight, that the Tevinter Imperium is on its way back to being the power that it was and they're still as brutal and insane as before, the war between the mages and Templars appears to be set to spread across the world, and it's not looking good for anyone. Except Flemeth. Which really means the world's screwed.
• Drakengard:
  • The whole series tends to be known for Downer Endings. The first game in particular has all of the Seals that were keeping the world from ending being destroyed. This includes the death of Caim's sister Furiae. Caim's dragon companion Angelus, whom he's built a bond with throughout the game, is sacrificed to become a new Seal in a rather painful process. They are forever separated. And on top of it all, the two are still bonded in a pact, so Caim's voice is never returned to him. And that's the happiest of its five endings.
  • Ending B has Furiae, whom after dying, is brought back to life by Inuart using one of the Seeds of Resurrection, with terrifying results. She becomes a giant monster that kills Inuart, and it falls to Caim and Angelus to defeat her. Upon doing so, Caim holds her lifeless corpse in his arms as he watches every seed spawn a copy of her, their shrieks heralding the end of mankind.
  • Ending C has the main villain, Manah, eaten by dragons, before Angelus turns into a Chaos version of herself and turns against Caim. The pact is broken, Caim regains his voice, and the two must fight to the death. Upon defeating her, he leaves to battle the rest of the dragon race.
  • Ending D also has the main villain killed, this time by her brother Seere and his pact beast. With all the seals broken, the world is thrown into chaos, and Grotesqueries fall from the sky devouring everything. Your allies are consumed one-by-one until you toss Seere onto the Grotesqurie Queen, where upon he releases his "time" and freezes them all in time for eternity. This also happens as Caim and his dragon are being eaten, therefore, they are being devoured for all eternity.
  • Lastly, with Ending E, Caim and his dragon follow the Grotesquerie Queen through a rift that lands them in modern day Tokyo. They defeat her there, and just as all seems well and they rejoice, they're shot down with missiles from a pair of fighter jets. "Unidentified Target Neutralized." The credits roll, and afterwards the screen pans down to show the dragon impaled by Tokyo Tower. This ending leads to the events in NieR, which gives its own set of Downer Endings (see below).
• Drawn to Life had a sad ending, but it's taken up a notch and then some in its sequel, to the point where 5th Cell rereleased it with a lighter, happier ending.
• For such a relaxing game, Dream Chronicles sure has some sad endings. The first one ends with the heroine being whisked to a magical prison, and the second ends with her getting amnesia and forgetting her husband and child.
• Dreamfall: The Longest Journey: One of the heroines gets stabbed and disappears without a trace, possibly dead. The male hero finally sees the light and turns to the good side, only to be captured by the bad guys. The evil mind-control plan you sabotaged and thwarted? Only delayed; the final cutscene shows the public going crazy about the product without knowing what it really does. The main character's ex-boyfriend who she still had feelings for? Most likely dead, replaced by a clone without anyone knowing the difference. The guy who the main character fell in love with during the game? Disappeared, presumably dead. The main character herself? In a coma and about to die after being duped by the bad guys. With her father crying by her side as her life fades away. Not to even mention the heartwrenching scene where your plush toy/pet android, if you put his batteries back into him after using them elsewhere, talks with one of the big bads right after you've fallen into a coma about if you're going to wake up ever again. It also counts that about a billion seemingly really important things are left completely unanswered by the time the game ends.
• In DreamWeb, the PC gets shot to pieces by the cops even if he manages to stop the plot to control the Dreamweb itself. Heroes don't last long in this cyberpunk universe.
• Mia's route in Duel Savior Destiny has three different endings, technically: A, B, and C. C is an early ending that basically means 'way to fail at scoring the other heroines, player' while B is a mandatory ending required before you can see the good ending A. In it, Taiga accidentally kills his sister and commits suicide.
• In the fantasy video games Dungeon Siege and Dungeon Siege II, the heroes' final victory over the Big Bad results in a cataclysm and The End of the World as We Know It. Twice. There's also the ending of the Dungeon Siege II: Broken World short story, "Bound Together".
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: As of October 2023, the Evil Runi route was updated to be much darker while having stricter requirements, since it requires Akira to never spend an Activity Point while rejecting friendship with Runi. This results in Runi mind-wiping herself out of grief over Edgar's sacrifice. Unlike the original version of the ending where the party defeats Gemini with minimal casualties, this ending has Gemini mind-wipe all party members except for Detritus, who sacrifices himself to protect Akira from Gemini's final barrage of spells. Unfortunately, when Akira presses forward to the human stasis room, Zazz ambushes and kills them, having survived his battle by escaping while the party was distracted with Gemini. As a result, Zazz creates his apartheid state unimpeded and starts a world war against the non-human nations. All the archangel bosses call the player out for their poor decisions and advise them to be nicer to Runi in the next playthrough.
• Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is equal parts Downer Ending and Wham in lower difficulty levels. After Strike Team Lightning successfully kills the Ravager Queen and activates the bomb, they are informed by Ops that they are acceptable losses on the mission. Their Ops contact refuses to give up on them, and gives them coordinates towards a possible escape route, leading to the mother of all Boss Rushes, forcing the squad to take on all the game's previous bosses more or less simultaneously, with new bosses (including 2 Hector IIs) appearing to fill in as other ones are wiped out, all while an alien mothership strafes the area with laser fire. All that seems for nothing, as the escape route is blocked, but then a dropship pilot from earlier missions arrives to ferry the team out. At the very last second, however, the ship takes a hit, can't escape the bomb in time, and the whole squad is killed when the bomb goes off. The last lines in the game are your Ops contact yelling for you over the radio. Mission over, game over. If the game is completed on Hard or Inferno, the ending is extended to show that Lightning Squad and Sully miraculously survive.
• Both of Edna & Harvey: The Breakout's endings. One is much more obvious — obeying Dr. Marcel leads to Edna willingly having her personality erased — while the other is less so: choosing to instead push Dr. Marcel down the stairs leads to an epilogue that implies that she died trying to escape. The sequel, meanwhile, also features multiple endings, which follow a similar pattern. Choosing to obey Dr. Marcel again leads to Lilli being brainwashed, choosing to stab him leads to an ending implies that Lilli abandoning her morals as the cost of being free, and the slightly hidden "contradict" ending has Lilli openly abandon the scene, with absolutely nothing being resolved.
• Elden Ring has two of the most unambiguously bad endings in a FromSoftware game. Both of them require you to go out of your way to get them, and the quest-givers for these endings are open about their intentions. In one case, your companion Melina will outright beg you not to go any further and destroy the world.
  • "Lord of Frenzied Flame": In this ending, the Tarnished becomes the Lord of Chaos, incarnation of the Frenzied Flame, and burns down the Erdtree completely. In its place, a spiral of yellow flame rises up to the sky, scorching the Lands Between and wiping out all life. With the Tarnished's betrayal fully complete, Melina promises to seek out the Tarnished and grant them "Destined Death". A variant of the ending plays out if the player character encounters the Three Fingers after Melina's sacrifice: this one removes Melina's part in the ending cutscene, leaving the Lord of Chaos with nobody that can stop them.
  • "Blessing of Despair": In this variant of the "Elden Lord" ending, the Tarnished accepts the Dung Eater's misanthropic ideology and uses his Mending Rune to fix the Elden Ring, dooming all mankind and the Lands Between itself to a Fate Worse than Death that will spread from generation to generation. The narrator, who in other endings mostly sounds neutral, sounds horrified in this one.
• Elemental Gearbolt's ending was inevitable. The protagonists are already dead, Bel Cain and his kingdom are doomed, and even Tagami is unable to leave World 4 in the aftermath.
• All three games in the Enchanter Trilogy have an alternate horrific ending caused by bungling your attempt to take out the Big Bad. Achieving them gives you a negative final score and the title Enemy of Humanity.
  • In Enchanter, the only way to destroy Krill is a scroll so powerful it was used as bait to lure an Eldritch Abomination into a trap. If you play your cards right, you can sneak in, swipe the scroll, and get back out again. If not, Krill is the least of the world's worries.
  • In Sorcerer, your goal is to save your mentor Belboz from Demonic Possession. Once you actually reach him, this is fairly easy to do. But you'd better have shielded your own mind first, or the demon Jeearr will just take you over instead.
  • In Spellbreaker, there are two ways to fail on an epic scale. The shadowy figure has assembled the cosmic keystones and prepares to recreate the universe in its own image. If you simply fail to stop it, you're blamed because you inadvertantly created the figure in the first place. If you stop the figure from using itself as the universal template but forget to provide a replacement, congratulations on managing a Class X-4 apocalypse in a Sword and Sorcery game.
• The End Is Nigh, since it's an Edmund McMillen game, does this for its first ending. Ash dies as the glowing orb explodes, ending the world for the third time, although he dies with a smile. The second ending can be this, as Ash is transformed into a small planet and stuck forever in Nevermore, but at least he is no longer alone.
• In the BL game Enzai: Falsely Accused, as can be expected about a game that is riddled with Prison Rape, every ending that doesn't involve your main character being proven innocent and thus leaving prison is one of these. Among others are cases where he gets shot while trying to escape, ends up as an Empty Shell due to all the trauma or gets targeted by the Big Bad, resulting in him going downright insane.
• Eternal Darkness is broken up into chapters and each chapter's end is also when a character's time in the story is over. Most of the chapter endings are complete downers:
  • Ellia's chapter ends with her seemingly killed by Pious, but you later find out in Lindsey's chapter that Ellia has been kept alive as a rotting husk for centuries by Mantorok's heart, which is still in her body. She fades away once she gives up the heart to Lindsey.
  • Anthony's chapter ends with him succumbing to the curse he was afflicted with and unable to save Charlemagne. Like Ellia before him, Anthony is kept alive as a rotting zombie through his curse and is unable to die until centuries later where Paul finally puts him to rest.
  • Karim sees Chandra come to him in the form a ghost due to her being killed by the wife of a nobleman she slept with. Chandra states that Karim must sacrifice his life in order to guard an artifact that man must never claim. Karim begrudgingly does so and spends the next several centuries cutting down people in the afterlife that tried to claim the artifact. His spirit finally rests when he finds out Roberto is one of the chosen.
  • Paul Luther encounters the Black Guardian at the end of his chapter and it either stomps him flat or pops his head via psychic powers. Unlike the other chosen, Paul didn't accomplish anything and had nothing to pass on, thus he doesn't have a ghost form until he and the others assist Alex in the Final Battle.
  • Maximilian Roivas kills his staff in a fit of paranoia, thinking they were all Bonethieves. He gets locked away in an asylum and despite him warning everyone about the incoming darkness, no one listens. His ghost appears years later towards his predecessor, Edward, and shows him the hidden room in the mansion where the Tome of Eternal Darkness lies in wait.
  • Roberto is captured by a warlord and is forced to do surveys within the Forbidden City so that the Pillar of Flesh can be constructed. Once Roberto is finished with his work, he is "rewarded" by being tossed into the pillar and is buried in concrete. His ghost appears to Michael Edwards centuries later and gives him the artifact.
  • Lastly, Edward himself. He finds out the whole conspiracy behind the Ancients and puts a damper in their plans. Decades later, the Ancients send one of their minions to kill Edward and it does so by eating his head.
• In Eternal Senia, Senia fails to save Magaleta in all three endings. Though only the first two endings completely count as this, since in the third ending, Senia and Magaleta are alive and the former is freed from Eternity's power.
• The eventual ending to the human/monster war in Evolve, though we never get to see it in-game. The humans manage to seal the monsters back in their own dimension, but all the hunters are either dead or soon to be, massive numbers of humans have died, entire populated worlds have been razed, technological progress has been pushed back hundreds of years, and the source of humanity's most advanced technologies can never be used again for fear of restarting the war.
• Exmortis:
  • The first game gives you a choice of two intensely depressing endings: having found out that you're actually the Hand of Repose, a prophesied living gateway for the Exmortis to return to Earth through, you can either decide to Screw Destiny and run for it, or give in and become the Hand. If you decide to run, you make it as far as the forest before being jumped by an Exmortis demon, whereupon you wake up exactly where you began the game, with no memory. And if you choose to give in, you're stuck watching your new masters obliterate the human race for the rest of your life. Either way, you're screwed.
  • Exmortis 2 is even worse. At the behest of a shadowy benefactor, you travel across a world ruled by the Exmortis, picking through abandoned houses for clues and getting scared shitless by ghosts, demons, and the bodies they left in their wake: at the end of it all, you get to put the Hand of Repose out of his/her misery and send every last Exmortis tumbling back into the Spirit Realm, freeing the human survivors from their reign of terror. And then you meet the shadow benefactor, who reveals that he's actually Lord Vlaew, the master of the Exmortis; apparently he wanted to avoid being betrayed by his own minions, and now that you've succeeded in removing the only creatures capable of killing him, he'll be able to rule the world as he sees fit. As if it couldn't get any worse, Vlaew congratulates you for your help and gives you a reward: a quick death.
  • Exmortis 3 (which isn't as well known due to requiring $20 just to play it), goes even lower: While at the beginning you return from the Spirit World with incredible new powers given to you by one of the suffering Ancients, Azrael; when you finally defeat Vlaew once and for all, he opens a portal and his lair collapses around him. Going through this portal sends you eons into the past, long before humanity rose, dooming you for good.
• Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy in the USA) has two negative endings.
  • In the first, the Purple clan (a race of intelligent machines) wins — the temperature on the planet continues to drop, leaving 3/4 of the world population dead, and even if the rest of humanity manages to thwart the machines' reign, they will still be forced to live underground because of the cold. Very bad ending.
  • In the second, the Oracle (a Mayan sorcerer) wins — although there is no immediate effect, the protagonist still occasionally sees through the eyes of the Oracle, and knows that bad things are yet to happen.
• Fallout has the player character get the Vault its needed water chip, and save the world from The Master, but he'll still get exiled at the end, as the Overseer is now terrified of him. The clip of him dejectedly walking back into the wastes afterwards while the Ink Spot's "Maybe" plays in the background is a pretty powerful scene. In an alternative ending (depending on the player character traits chosen at the beginning, or the character's alignment, or the player's ability to press the "initiate combat" button before the Overseer walks away), the player responds to this rejection by killing his boss in a violent fashion. It's almost alright, though; the intelligent Deathclaws that moved into the Vault sometime between the first and second games built a little memorial for him.
  • He does earn his happy ending eventually. Between the events of Fallout and Fallout 2, it's described that some of the Vault 13 Dwellers leave and set off after him. Together, they all form the Arroyo tribe.
  • If you take too long to defeat The Master in Fallout, it's guaranteed most of your ending slides are gonna suck. Special mention for Necropolis, which was canonically destroyed by the Super Mutants.
  • Fallout 3 has a similar ending where, in the "good" ending, the Vault Dweller sacrifices his own life to bring clean water to the wasteland of DC. This was changed so that they survive and gives them the option to send in their radiation-immune companions instead^note Though the game still calls you a coward if you do this in the Broken Steel expansion due to fan complaints. Fallout 3 has another gruesome evil ending if the player character decides to assist the Enclave in their genocide plans. In the original game, this ending resulted in the deaths of everyone in the Wasteland and perhaps the entire Earth (including the player) except the Enclave and those living in vaults. This also has consequences for Broken Steel, in which the clinics are overloaded with dying patients and consuming Aqua Pura will kill the player as well.
  • Fallout 2 has a mostly happy ending (unless you're an evil fuck)… except for one town. No matter what you do, Broken Hills will remain broken. Killing the mutants will destroy its economy. Not doing anything will cause a race riot that'll kill everyone. Actually fostering peace will cause the mines to run dry, ruining the town, though the residents at least move on with no bloodshed.
  • Fallout: New Vegas: If Caesar's Legion end up winning the Battle of Hoover Dam and driving the NCR out of the Mojave territory, it's certainly a Downer Ending as most minor groups get wiped out or enslaved, including the Great Khans, the Kings, and the Brotherhood of Steel. The Boomers will not be on this list unless the player decides to kill them personally instead of recruiting them, as Caesar considers trying to conquer them more trouble than it's worth, but they're just about the only people in the Mojave who end the game alive and free. Even more so if Caesar dies and his Ax-Crazy second-in-command Legate Lanius takes the helm, as he warmly embraces Murder Is the Best Solution and adds the pacifistic and idealistic Followers of the Apocalypse to the list. For the Great Khans, the only happy ending for them is brought about by convincing them to flee the Mojave, where they later move into Wyoming and try their hand at nation building — the alternatives are allowing them all to die in a pointless Last Stand, being assimilated or exterminated by the Legion, or convincing them to ally with the NCR, who reward them for their assistance in the battle by forcibly evicting them to a barren reservation.
  • Fallout 4: Your son is now an amoral scientist who has been trying to save his isolated underground village of scientists, but they're so utterly directionless that all they do is make monsters that kill thousands of innocents for flimsy excuses. If you decide to side with them, you find out he has extreme cancer (and attempting to fix that would make him an abomination like The Master or Mister House, so he says screw that), so he WILL die in every possible ending. Yay!
  • Also very much the case for human civilization before the bombs fell. People struggled with energy and resource shortages, oppressive governments, and years of non-stop brutal warfare until the Chinese threw a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum and decided to wreathe the entire world in atomic fire. What's worse, it's suggested that technology had advanced enough to overcome these issues, but the nations had been fighting for so long that they were incapable of changing. However, given the A World Half Full nature of the setting, it's implied that the Great War wasn't the end of humanity, but rather the Reset Button it needed.
• This comes up a lot in the Far Cry series:
  • Far Cry 2 had two endings, both of which boil down to whether the mercenary chooses to take the detonator or the diamonds. If the player chooses the detonator, he dies setting off the explosives in a Heroic Sacrifice. Choosing the diamonds isn't implied to be much better: The player is suffering heavily from malaria and The Jackal gives him a gun with which he is supposed to commit suicide once the player uses the diamonds to bribe the border guards to allow the innocent civilians to escape the country. Oh, and prior to all this, the player's buddies (as in all of the other mercenaries the player didn't choose to play as) betray the player and are killed, as is almost every other named character in the game. Even The Jackal is dying from cancer. So, unless you assume the player managed to get treatment for his malaria in the bribe the border guards ending and doesn't commit suicide, this game doesn't go well for anyone, save possibly the civilians The Jackal decides to save.
  • Far Cry 3's bad ending. Jason is driven insane by the Rakyat lifestyle and his quest for vengeance, and is now no better than the Ax-Crazy Ruthless Modern Pirates he fought against. Tempted by Citra, he slaughters all of the friends he set out to save and begins having sexual intercourse with her, only for Citra to fatally stab him to death once she's pregnant. The ending implies that Citra will raise Jason's unborn child as the leader of the islands. Thankfully, the good ending is much more pleasant.
  • Far Cry 4: You can just let the bad ending happen if you aren't ready to take a stand. Pagan Min can pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here, Amita will turn Kyrat into a communist state (complete with slave labor and child soldiers, and she killed her little sister figure) if she becomes the next leader, and Sabal will begin a purge of all "heretics" (and the purge includes most of Kyrat since they were forced to pay lip service to Pagan Min) if he becomes the next leader. If you don't like it, you can kill any of the three and call it a day, but Ajay will have to live with himself, knowing that he killed all these people trying to fight for a greater cause, only to end up the barbarian leader himself.
  • In every ending of Far Cry 5, The Bad Guy Wins. You can either choose to let Joseph Seed go (then later succumb to his brainwashing), or attempt to take him in. In the latter case, following a Final Boss battle, nuclear bombs go off in Hope County and across Montana. In the end, seemingly the only people left alive are you and Joseph Seed, who adopts you as his new "family" and gloats about how he Knew It All Along. You can also opt to not put Joseph Seed in irons at the beginning of the game and walk away, leaving him to continue his dark schemes unabated. The nuclear bomb ending turned out to be the canon one (before this was retconned by Far Cry 6), as it ended up being a prelude to Far Cry: New Dawn. However, the game does rectify 5’s ending by allowing the game’s protagonist to finally kill Joseph, though he can be spared and left to suffer with the knowledge of the horrible things he’s done.
• Fatal Frame
  • Fatal Frame has Mafuyu choose to stay with Kirie at the hellgate, so she won't be lonely in her duty anymore. Miku is forced out of the mansion and now suffers horrible Survivor's Guilt, which makes her a perfect target for the third game's curse.
  • Fatal Frame II:
    • The original game has Mio kill her sister Mayu to complete the Crimson Butterfly ritual, much to her shock and horror. Just like Miku, she ends up stuck in the Manor of Sleep in the third game over her feelings of guilt.
    • In the Updated Re-release. two new downer endings are added. Frozen Butterfly has Mio refuse to go through with the ritual, resulting in Mayu killing her, with implications that they are now stuck in Minakami village on a loop. The Shadow Festival has Mio arrive too late to perform the ritual and the Repentance occurs, killing her and Mayu. The only upside to this ending is the implication that they are, at least, together.
  • Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water:
    • Yuri's Bad Ending has her choose to complete her previously attempted suicide, falling into the depths of the ocean with Ouse and a minor implication that they are happy together this way. The worst part is that Hisoka, who had stopped Yuri's previous suicide attempt and taken her in, is forced to watch Yuri succeed this time. And as the player learned, this is not the first time Hisoka has been unable to stop a girl from killing herself.
    • Miu's Bad Ending reveals that her mother has been long dead and the one she has chased after and interacted with during the game was nothing but a mere trace of her spirit still residing. Her desire to meet and really learn of the mother that left her at an early age was to never become true, after all. She's last seen dissolving into tears.
• Fate Series:
  • Whilst most of the (actual) endings to the game are bittersweet, the Normal End of the Heaven's Feel route in Fate/stay night is truly heartbreaking and tragic. Shirou sacrifices the ideal he'd been living for to protect his girlfriend Sakura halfway through the story and ends up with progressively worse brain damage in his attempts to keep her safe and get her back. At the end, it finally kills him. That's bad, but then it switches to the perspective of Sakura, who never moves on and never accepts that he's dead.
  • Fate/Grand Order:
    • The Olympus chapter of the 5th Lostbelt ends on this note. While Zeus is defeated and the Lostbelt is destroyed, this is a small victory compared to everything else to result from the chapter's events. Musashi ends up erasing herself from existence in order to seal away Chaos, rendering her Killed Off for Real. Kirschtaria Wodime's plan to ascend humanity into gods fails and he's betrayed and killed. Beryl, the one truly evil member of the Crypters, escapes the Lostbelt with Koyanskaya. The Foreign God finally descends, revealing themselves to not only be Beast VII, but also take on the appearance of the long thought dead Olga Marie. And finally, Kotomine reveals that he's planning to turn the Ultimate One of the Oort Cloud into a vessel for the Foreign God.
    • The Avalon le Fae Lostbelt ends on this note. The Faerie British Isle is completely destroyed by the Calamities, with only three people left in the Lostworld until it reaches its end. Chaldea failed to save anyone in the Lostworld, failed their secondary goal of retrieving Rhongomyniad, and Sion's dialogue also hints that Chaldea's good luck with avoiding casualties is about to come to an end. The only bright spots to come out of the chapter are that Chaldea was successful in stopping the Lostworld's destruction from also destroying Proper Human History, and they've managed to get their hands on another potential weapon against the Foreign God in the form of Excalibur.
• Fear & Hunger: Either get Mercy Killed by the little girl you went out of your way to protect, lose your mind to eldritch knowledge from the god of destruction, submit to Le'garde and watch him establish a dictatorship, kill him and leave as a Shell-Shocked Veteran, become a Deity of Human Origin yourself with a high chance of leaving the world a worser place or accomplishing little of note, or just try to leave, only for it to be hinted that you're still stuck. Only the Hard Mode-exclusive endings have the heroes accomplish what they set out to do, and even then, Cahara is traumatized by what he's witnessed for the rest of his life, and D'arce is all but said to have enabled Le'garde's rise to power.
• Fear & Hunger: Termina:
  • While most characters do end up recovering from their experience and making a positive change in their variants of Ending B, Levi and Daan don't. The former ends up Walking the Earth trying to escape his nightmares, to no avail, while the latter crosses the Despair Event Horizon and willingly subjects himself to Death of Personality.
  • Ending C for all characters involves them personally killing every other contestant, then accepting Per'kele's offer to join the Cult of Sulfur, resulting in their death and the heavy implication that they will return as an Ax-Crazy servant of the Satanic Archetype.
• F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is a downer as it gets. The game ends with your entire squad except Morales and possibly Stokes killed, and Alma is still free and running about. Also, Alma rapes you.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The finale of Crisis Core sees the protagonist, Zack, gunned down by the whole Shinra army, just outside of Midgar, where he was going to see his girlfriend after being apart for five years, while his friends in the Turks searched vainly for him in order to save his life. If you've ever played (or even heard of) the original, you know it's a foregone conclusion (this game being a prequel and all), but it's still heartbreaking.
    • Especially when you consider that what Cloud and Zack suffered together sets the stage for Cloud's emotional dysfunction in the original game and provides Sephiroth with the ammo he needs to Mind Rape Cloud.
  • While Dirge of Cerberus itself has a happy ending, its online multiplayer mode certainly does not. The nameless Deepground soldier PC defeats the tyrannical Restricter, but with his last breath, he lashes out at her, fatally wounding her. As she dies, the Tsviets appear and tell her that the entire time they were tricking her into killing the Restricter so they could commence their own plans for world conquest. The game ends with the camera showing the Tsviets laughing at their triumph from the PC's point of view as the screen slowly fades to black as she slowly bleeds out. And her dead little sister, whose death is what spurred her to fight the Restricter to begin with? She never existed. The Tsviets implanted the nameless soldier with Fake Memories so they could more easily control her.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2: Serah dies, Lightning becomes crystallized, Noel realizes that he just gave Caius exactly what he wanted, and he and Hope are trapped at the ground zero of a massive Time Crash.
  • The first iteration of Final Fantasy XIV had this happen in ultimate form.
    • First the Big Bad decides to throw the lesser moon, Dalamud, onto the planet. It is during that procedure that Bahamut breaks out of the moon that it was imprisoned in, and proceeded to devastate the world. And while The Path manages to get him re-sealed, a quarter of the world is already destroyed and another still on fire. Every single player is a Warrior of Light, and all that they could do during that final quest was stand close to the battlefield, watching the moon go down as a woman's voice softly echoed in the silence and a timer counted down their last seconds. The most powerful people the world has ever seen could do nothing but stand there and watch.
    • A Realm Reborn reveals the surviving world is still recovering from the terrible consequences of calamity. The disaster has changed the climate of entire regions, ruined farmland, forcing factions and races to turn on each other for the few resources left to avoid extinction. Countless people died in every region, but very few can even be remembered by their loved ones, who may or may not even realize they have lost someone depending on proof left behind. This is not limited to those who died, however; survivors may not remember their still living loved ones, either both or one. Even amongst the scions, we have Una Tayuun from 1.0, who has been entirely forgotten by all the other scions, while the other two members of her team who were always around her are missing.
    • A Realm Reborn doesn't fare much better, as the final story patch before Heavensward has the player and their companions being framed for high treason after a member of the Ul'dah Syndicate attempts to have the Sultana assassinated. The other City State leaders are unable to do anything to aid without making the situation even worse and the one who does ends up losing one of his arms and getting thrown in prison for his troubles. In this process, each and every member of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn end up vanishing as they attempt to flee the city state until it's just the player, Alphinaud, and Tataru who are all forced to flee to Coerthas (though the player can still freely return to the other areas once the cutscene is over).
    • Heavensward doesn't let up in its post-game MSQ: Fighting between the Empire and rebels in Ala Mhigo intensifies as a result of Ilberd launching a False Flag Operation with his soldiers dressed up in Alliance uniforms, successfully forcing them into the conflict on the previously ignored Ala Mhigan front. Not satisfied with this, he also succeeds in summoning Shinryu by setting up his own veteran Ala Mhigan rebel forces to be massacred and sacrificing himself with Nidhogg's eyes in hand, forcing Papalymo to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to try and contain the primal born from their despair and Ilberd's hatred. Papalymo only succeeds in buying the heroes enough time to find and activate Omega in the hopes of defeating Shinryu, but both disappear after their fight while the heroes and Alliance are forced to deal with the growing unrest in Ala Mhigo.
    • Stormblood: Over the course of the late endgame MSQ, several members of the Scions fall into mysterious comas as fighting between the Empire and Ala Mhigo once again intensifies. During a pivotal battle, the Warrior of Light is contacted by a mysterious figure from another world, one in danger of being completely destroyed, and the destruction of which would lead to a Calamity of apocalyptic proportions on Hydaelyn. In order to prevent The End of the World as We Know It, the Warrior of Light will need to travel to this new world, leaving the outcome of the current war with the Empire in question...
    • Shadowbringers: While the First is saved and the Scions' souls are returned to their bodies, the war against Garlemald takes a drastic turn as Fandaniel, one of the last Ascians, sets into motion a plan to recreate the apocalypse that nearly destroyed the Ascians' world, erecting towers, kidnapping beastmen, and forcing them into summoning twisted versions of the primals. At the same time, Zenos, having regained his body, is conspiring with Fandaniel, having murdered his own father, the Emperor, and perfectly content to let Garlemald to fall into ruin if it means getting a rematch with the Warrior of Light. On top of all of that, Alphinaud and Alisaie's father, Fourchenault, travels all the way from Sharlayan just to tell the Alliance that they are maintaining their strict nonviolent stance and refusing to help fight Zenos and Fandaniel, despite the overwhelming evidence that their insane plan threatens the entire planet. When the twins take issue with this and beg him to get Sharlayan's leaders to reconsider, Fourchenault's response is to furiously disown them both for, in his eyes, Going Native and "betraying" their homeland's ideals like Louisoix before them.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: On one hand, the Lucavi demons are destroyed and mankind is saved. On the other hand, everyone who fought them died doing it, and no one ever knew how close they were to the end of the world because they were too busy fighting a civil war. The heroes might have been remembered had the one decent person who survived the entire ordeal and wrote an eyewitness account of such not been burned at the stake for charges of heresy because the revealing of what the heroes have done would reveal the falsehood the Church has been spreading for generations. And, if you're in the camp that sympathizes with Delita, he loses everyone dear to him, because the hero who slayed the demons had been his best friend, the princess he married and became King and Queen with decided that Delita had manipulated everyone and herself as well, and stabbed Delita, who, in turn, lethally stabbed her back. The man who had manipulated everyone else and became King lost his sister, his best friend, and his wife in rapid succession, and was forever alone, unloved, and misunderstood at the top of the kingdom even if he survived. On the bright side, though, decades after the events of the game, it is revealed that the narrator of the story, having already established himself as a credible historian of his time, is, in fact, the descendant of the eyewitness who was burned at the stake, and that he was successful in revealing the truth to the world. Also, Ramza and his party having died is just a fan interpretation. If anything, the ending (particularly the PSP version's) implies they did survive, if obliquely. Ollan isn't sure whether what he sees is really Ramza and Alma, but then, if they were ghosts, why would they be riding Chocobos? And the PSP version's credits show the two of them stopping off for water by a stream, very much implying they're still alive.
  • This is subverted in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates (much to the joy of the player, albeit in a slightly confused fashion), where the protagonists, after having endured numerous wounds at the hands of Glades, look to be set up for a miserable life… but accidentally achieve Glade's goal of becoming a god, and use it to rewrite reality so that they and their friends can live Happily Ever After.
  • Final Fantasy Adventure, unusually for a Game Boy game (And a 1990s game at that!) has this. Most people assumed that the hero would get the girl as usual, but as it turns out he doesn't...since she has to become the Mana tree, after Julius had drained all of it. The Girl becomes the mana tree, and the Boy is the last guardian of the Mana tree. Since both are the last of their kind, all they did was just buy the world some more time. This accompanies with some of the saddest music possible on the Game Boy.
• Ending D of Fishing Vacation. You are caught by the uncle and sacrificed to Sedna. It's unclear what happened to your friend; they may have been able to escape but they could also have been captured too.
• Five Nights at Freddy's 4 has the child's torture at the hand of his brother and his friends end with them picking him up and placing his head inside Fredbear's mouth, resulting in the child being bitten. ^note This is a different bite incident and occured in 1983, not the infamously mentioned Bite of '87 The last scene depicts the child in darkness, with a Golden Freddy plushie telling him that he'll make sure the kid gets better… and then you hear the child flat-lining.
• Flood had an unusual downer ending for a 16-bit era game. After guiding Quiffy through 40 levels to escape the sewer, he climbs through an exit...revealing that he was the size of an insect all along, and he is immediately crushed under the tyres of a passing car.
• In For Honor, the Big Bad Apollyon is defeated, however she ultimately succeeds in inciting war between the three factions and it's years before their leaders realize what truly happened. While Cross, Stigandr, and Ayu agree to try and end the war, they admit that it will be extremely difficult and likely get them killed, and the collapse of peace caused the Forever War in multiplayer. Worse still, the Order of Horkos would continue to sabotage any attempts at peace.
• In the freeware short game Frog Wednesday 2, you playtest the titular game, which was made as a sequel to a viral indie game called Frog Wednesday and whose ownership was sold to a large corporation. The project is overseen by a clueless exec named Mark while the original indie team lead by Trent was hired to work on the sequel. Depending on a particular action you take late in the game, you get one of two equally-depressing endings:
  • In Trent's ending, he admits to the player that he's aware that he sold out for money and he hates what Frog Wednesday has become under its new owners, but there's no longer anything he can do about it, and thus ends up packing his things and leaving the project.
  • In Mark's ending, his failure to understand the game and what made it so popular, compounded by a string of increasingly bad ideas that blatantly copy from other popular video games, causes him to have an emotional breakdown, and he winds up cancelling Frog Wednesday 2. You also don't get paid because you technically didn't finish the playtest.
• The ending in From Next Door where the creature abducts Namie, claiming yet another victim with no one but Daisuke Sen knowing the truth (and he's all but powerless to intervene). It's the worst ending by far (another bad ending has Namie dying, but she at least takes the creature with her).
• Game of Thrones (Telltale) ends with the main characters failing to Bring Help Back (except for Asher, who managed to secure a small band of sellswords while in exile), the Lord of House Forrester being gravely wounded as Ironrath is captured, the eldest Forrester sister being either put to death or forced to marry a man who wants to steal her family's fortune, and the former Forrester lord's squire either too late and failing to uphold his lord's Last Words or keeping his promise and leaving his lord's family and land to die. And after the bankruptcy of Telltale Games, it's most likely that these plotlines will never be resolved.
• GemCraft has it at least twice.
  • In chapter zero, you free the Forgotten to possess you and terrorize the countryside.
  • In chapter one, you beat the Forgotten's minions, only to get possessed by her.
• Geneforge 4. The three major endings are: letting the Shapers win and in doing so make the whole rebellion completely pointless, help the rebellion release the Unbound so that the war spreads to the other half of the continent, or force a stalemate that results in the PC being executed or enslaved.
  • It is possible if you have the right amount of hidden stats for you to be merely imprisoned and have a lot of people come to agree with your ideas. And in some of the shaper endings, it's possible for them to have a reform of their code that allows more of an amnesty for Serviles.
  • Even if you force a stalemate (which is the canon ending), Geneforge 5 reveals that the Unbound stopped keeping the peace and started to wreck the world again anyway. The victory that the PC had been imprisoned for still ended up making everything worse in the end.
  • The majority of endings in the Geneforge series are downer endings to some degree. There are very few good ones, and they're typically hard to get.
• God of War III ends with the world in a state of total chaos and destruction. A flood covers everything except the highest mountains, the dead and monsters roam the Earth, plant life has died, plagues are rampant, and storms feel the skies blocking out the sun. Kratos attempts to commit suicide both to return Hope to the world and to offer one last insult to Athena; humanity is now free of the gods. Yet there is no one left to use Hope, and a Time Skip proves that Greece is completely and utterly FUBAR. Welcome to Midgard.
• Games in the Grand Theft Auto series have mostly had victorious endings, ranging from "Okay, there's no corrupt cop trying to ruin our lives any more, we're fine" to "I rule all of Vice City now! Mwa ha ha ha haaa!". But there are exceptions:
  • Grand Theft Auto IV has a darker and more sincere narrative, and ends with Niko's cousin/best friend being accidentally shot dead at his own wedding; Niko gets his revenge, but it doesn't make him feel better. It also makes it even more of a downer since Roman's fiance was pregnant. There is an alternate ending, but it's not any better: Niko's girlfriend gets killed instead at the same wedding.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned wasn't much better. Johnny and the rest of the Lost MC break into prison and kill the traitorous Billy. But Johnny's best friend Jim is dead, as is most of the chapter. Plus their clubhouse is a wreck, so the remaining four members decide to burn the place down and go their seperate ways. Made even worse in GTA V when the last remaining members, including Johnny, are brutally killed by Trevor.
  • In GTA: Advance: You learn that your partner-in-crime Vinnie, who was planning to get out of Liberty City with you, never had such intentions. He apparently croaks early on, but was planning to eliminate you so you don't get caught up to him. You managed to kill him and escape from Liberty, but not without seeing 8-ball get arrested, the first contact aside from 8-ball killed, and Cisco, a Cartel dealer who you were friends with, crossed the heart of the Yakuza lady after apparently sleeping with her. A real bittersweet ending indeed.
  • And in Chinatown Wars, Huang Lee finds out that his uncle killed his father in cold blood on the orders of the triad boss Hsin, for the promise of being promoted once Hsin steps down. The game ends with Huang killing his uncle, having already killed several of his fellow triads who were framed as being snitches and being betrayed by another friendly contact.
  • By the end of Vice City Stories, Vic Vance has killed off all main antagonists and may have a very rich empire Vice City, depending on the player's actions, but he, in his own words, "spent all my time running around making morons rich, while my family fell apart, and the woman I wanted died while waiting for me to call." He never even wanted to get into drug dealing in the first place. The game ends with him leaving Vice City with Lance, declaring that he is not interested in the coke Lance wants to sell. Fast forward two years later to the events of Vice City, when Vic returns to Vice City to help Lance sell said coke, and is shot dead in the opening cutscene by Diaz's men.
  • Grand Theft Auto V is no aversion to this trope either. The two bad endings (Option A and Option B) both end with either Michael or Trevor dead, the other one refusing to hang out with Franklin, and almost all the antagonists walk away scot-free. However, Option C, which was later confirmed canon by future updates to the online mode, ends with all three protagonists surviving, and killing (or at least scaring off) basically everyone who stood in their way.
• Gregory Horror Show for the PS2: After dealing with the terrifying guests who were out to kill you, finding out their even more disturbing habits, wandering through a dungeon-like maze under the hotel, obtaining all of the souls within the hotel, dealing with Gregory's witch-like mother, who uses the souls to keep herself "beautiful", and fighting to remain sane throughout the whole affair, we come to the ending explaining that the hotel was a dream, a mental formation breeded by the weakness within all human hearts. Now, they could have ended it with the burning down of the hotel due to the sacrifice of NekoZombie, but oh no! The narrator reveals that the harsh reality of life may force him/her to return there. To make it worse, a CG clip at the end reveals that the hotel rebuilds itself, Gregory comes back from the dead, and that, yes, you really did come back to the hotel. Talk about a cruel twist.
• Guns of Icarus ends with the death of the main character and the destruction of the eponymous aircraft.
• Half-Life:
  • Half-Life and its expansion, Opposing Force, Gordon is placed into stasis as some sort of mercenary by the G-Man, and Adrian is apparently frozen for eternity, respectively.
  • Half-Life 2: Episode 2 ended with Eli Vance getting brainsucked by tentacled Advisors while his daughter and a helpless Gordon Freeman watch, horrified. Fade To Black with her weeping over his body.
• If you press A when The Halloween Hack narrator tells you to kill the monster. Even though Dr. Andonuts was going to die in the "good" ending anyway, the game mocks you for being a puppet. That, and Varik was implied to have died too.
• Hatred: The Antagonist gets the violent death he desires, getting gunned down by a squad of soldiers, but not before breaking into a nuclear power plant and triggering a meltdown that destroys the city.
• Haunting Ground's worst possible ending involves the death of Fiona's only companion, Hewie, and Riccardo successfully capturing and impregnating her, which drives her completely insane.
• Though it depends on how well the player did, many of the endings in Heavy Rain are hideously depressing. As a rule of thumb, if you failed to save Shaun, your ending is going to suck. Special shout out goes to Norman Jayden, who doesn't have a single happy ending. He either saves Shaun but suffers from illusions the rest of his life, retires from the FBI, overdoses on drugs, or dies. Dying might actually be his happiest ending, since it's implied he at least gets to torture Blake.
• In the web game Heir, based on Shadow of the Colossus, after beating chapter three, a cutscene plays in which the King kills the Pale Man, rather than making him his heir, as promised.
• Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising has a pretty hard-hitting ending. In the final mission, after much effort, your ship, converted into a makeshift nuke, destroys a structure designed to launch genetically engineered alien creatures into space. It Makes Sense in Context. Anyway, in the credits, you and your crew go down with the ship. The ship's nanotech creation engine hits the ocean floor with the alien launch platform, which promptly beings to assimilate it. As if this weren't bad enough, they show that the aliens managed to get into space anyway. Congrats, humanity's last weapon was sacrified for basically nothing except spare time (which the humans won't use because they think they've won), and if those aliens decide they want to come back home, the human race is fucked.
• Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number ends with the entire USA getting nuked by Russia after both countries' presidents get assassinated and the army takes control. Effectively killing every single character in the game (that hadn't been murdered already). The only possibly exception is Biker, but if he is still alive, he’ll have to live with the fact that he could have stopped all of this and failed.
• Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 and its remake Re;Birth2 have the infamous Conquest Ending. In this route, the only thing that can stop the Deity of Sin Arfoire (Hanzaishin/Crime God Magiquone in the Japanese dub) is the legendary sword Gehaburn that was never used in history. This sword is in fact a cursed sword that only gains power by killing CPUs, also known as goddesses. Since the heroines experienced that her four Quirky Mini Boss Squad and even a small fragment of her soul were very hard to handle, and the time of Arfoire's upcoming resurrection is very soon, the heroines realize that the cursed sword is the most effecient and only way too ensure their victory and save the world. However, when Nepgear tries to find a better alternative, it only brings up controversy among the CPUs, resulting that they split apart. Due to unfortunate circumstances, Neptune and Nepgear kill the other six goddesses and cannot turn back to waste their sacrificed lives. And to maximize the strength of Gehaburn, Neptune sacrifices her life by the hands of her younger sister Nepgear with the sword. And when Nepgear finally faces Arfoire, Arfoire makes no attempt to resist her, since she knows what Nepgear sacrificed just to use the sword. Even though Arfoire dies, her goal of the world's destruction and chaos has been set-up by Nepgear beforehand. With only one CPU left and only one nation, Nepgear will rule over the world in peace, without strive, without conflicts, without competition. This will result in that society will not advance and will not evolve; the world will stagnate and rot and people will eventually rebel against their sole ruler. And Arfoire will eventually resurrected again when the time has come. And Nepgear has been left by her remaining friends, and her head is full of doubts about the peaceful future.
• Ib has a multitude of these.
  • "Welcome to the World of Guertena", where The Bad Guy Wins. Mary decides to keep Garry and Ib trapped as her "playmates" in the gallery forever. Garry is insane and Ib has crossed the Despair Event Horizon. And if you look closely, you can see a Lady in Blue plucking the petals from Garry's rose...
  • "A Painting's Demise" has the same outcome as the ending above, except Mary decides to leave Garry and Ib behind to escape the gallery and live as a human. However, she cannot leave the gallery by herself and dies alone.
    "Poor little Mary
    Forever wandering all on your own"
  • "Ib All Alone": Instead of escaping the gallery, Ib stays behind, either due to hallucinating her mother/Garry or simply deciding not to leave. The Bonus Dungeon has a variant on this ending where Ib falls into an eternal slumber after sleeping on "Final Stage".
• Iji: The 1.7 update adds two:
  • If you execute General Tor after beating him, his second-in-command Kiron admonishes you and the human race for killing the only person willing to listen to you, and uses his new authority to authorise the Alpha Strike against Earth. Iji can only hug Dan (provided he is still alive) as the Earth is obliterated.
  • Opting to spare Iosa means the final fight with Tor gets interrupted with her breaking in with a Generation 2 gun (a weapon so hideously devastating that even the hyper-militaristic Komato consider it illegal to use in active combat) and obliterating Iji with a single shot. She then tries to extort Tor into destroying Earth, but is thwarted by Kiron, who calls off the strike and strips Iosa of her rank. She kills Tor in a rage and storms off, and the Komato fleet departs, leaving Dan standing over the lifeless body of his sister on a desolated Earth. As they leave orbit, Iosa just stares at her hands in disbelief that she realizes that she not only killed a combatant who had her under a gun and still decided not to kill her, but then her own husband over being denied her vengeance.
• The pessimist ending of I Miss the Sunrise might be this. The Black One claims that the events that transpire in it will destroy all of reality. If he is correct, this trope definitely applies.
• In the Hunt has a very nasty variation of Multiple Endings: In the first, you fail to escape the enemy HQ and are destroyed along with it, in the second, you become the new leader of the evil organization you were trying to destroy throughout the entire game, and in the third, both players sink to the bottom of the sea endlessly. To get the Golden Ending, you have to reach the final form of the final boss on more than one credit.
• Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg: Though most factions are treated in morally gray terms, the game makes it very clear that the Second American Civil War ending with the American Union State under Pelley being victorious is a horrific outcome. Pelley establishes a democracy that is only open to white Christian men, has the economic system dominated by monopolies loyal to him, and has the Minutemen crush all his opposition. The KKK become an influential part of the government, syndicalists are worked to death in forced labour camps, and hate crimes against blacks become just another part of American life. To top it off, he prohibits vaccines under the delusional belief that they are a syndicalist plot, which results in the biggest polio outbreak in American history and millions of Americans are left crippled.
• Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. In the "damned if you do" ending, Kane winds up alone on a small motorboat at sea with a dying Lynch and his dead daughter, despite the game giving you the illusion of there being a way to keep Kane's daughter alive all the way to the ending by making you protect your daughter through the last area. Even if protected flawlessly, she will get gunned down at the docks, and Lynch will take one in the chest while you get your boat started, and be dying. The one member of your crew you did save curses your name, rushes ahead, and grabs a second boat, ditching you. In the "damned if you don't" ending, Kane abandons Lynch in South America, with his crew being burned out of a church, certain to die, with his daughter vowing to hate him forever for abandoning the crew to save her life. For a game that seemed to be about Kane's redemption, that's two epic Downer Endings that some people intensely disliked.
• Kid Kool has multiple endings depending on how long it takes you to finish the game, with the worst one triggering if you take more than three hours (three in-game days). You make it back to the King's castle with the seven herbs needed to cure his ilness, only to find that he passed away because you took too long. Which is especially odd, considering he's the one who brings you back to life every time you die. Ironic... He could save others from death, but not himself.
• The ending of Killer7, for the first time in the entire game, presents players with a choice. Depending on their selection, either 1) the United States will nuke Japan off the face of the earth, or 2) Japan will launch an attack on the US, starting World War III. Either way, 100 years later Harman and Kun Lan will begin their battle all over again and it is implied that China becomes the world's next great superpower.
• Killzone:
  • Killzone 2 ends with you showing up in the Helghast Emperor's palace in order to arrest him. However, he points out that the ISA have lost millions of soldiers and entire fleets during the war, while the Helghast have lost "nothing" and only his leadership is keeping them in check. In anger, resident Ethnic Scrappy Rico kills him, only for you to find out he wasn't lying, as a substantial Helghast fleet, that had been kept in reserve, begins its vicious counter-attack.
  • Killzone 3 has a mixed ending wherein Stahl is escaping Sev and the ISA after an orbital battle, so the obvious solution is to drop a nuke on his now in-atmosphere ship which sets off an explosion that sweeps the entire planet. Cut to the protagonists noting that no more comms traffic - military OR civilian - is coming from the planet, and Sev openly wondering how many people were down there. During the credits, a scene is shown of some Helghast soldiers opening some kind of pod claiming 'We've found him'.
  • Killzone: Shadow Fall ends with your former mentor executing Stahl, then he shoots you in the face. Then he declares war on the Helghast when both sides are on the verge of destroying their own civilization. Then your sidekick makes a martyr of him. You basically saved both sides and restarted the galaxy-wide thermonuclear war.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Birth By Sleep didn't end well, to say the least. Ventus' heart is absorbed by Sora, while Ven's body lies in Castle Oblivion. Aqua is trapped in the World of Darkness, and has been for eleven years. Terra has his body taken by Xehanort and his consciousness trapped in his armor, standing in the same position until Sora finds and fights him in Kingdom Hearts II. Kingdom Hearts III would eventually tie this all together, but the ending to this game is seriously depressing.
  • Dream Drop Distance made the above events more dreadful with Master Xehanort not caring about their fates, and was shown to be quite glad that their sacrifices brought nothing. Mickey is outright furious about this. In fact, the game itself came very close to a Downer Ending, with Sora being rendered comatose and nearly becoming Master Xehanort's thirteenth clone, causing Sora to fail the Mark of Mastery exam through no fault of his own. The acts of Lea pulling a Big Damn Heroes, and later on, Riku mending Sora's shattered heart and becoming a Keyblade Master as a result manage to bring it to a Bittersweet Ending.
• The end of Kirby's Dream Land sees Dedede flung from his castle and falling to the ground. You're then shown the code for the "Extra Game". Completing that shows Dedede thrown to land on his head. He then runs around the screen crying in pain before collapsing. It's a wonder he ever "plays" with Kirby ever again.
  • Similarly^note by virtue of essentially being a remake to the "Extra Game" just like how Spring Breeze was to Kirby's Dream Land, after clearing the Revenge of the King game in Kirby Super Star Ultra, instead of showing Kirby's victory, the ending cinematic shows a defeated, depressed King Dedede walking a lonely road. At least his Waddle Dee friends come one by one to walk beside him. Yes, the game actually makes you feel guilty for winning, although seeing a Downer Ending for your opponent might be satisfying.
• Then there is Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. Not only does he lose his grandpa halfway through the game, after striking down the Big Bad, he finds out that he was just summoned there just to help by his friend in the ring, and was nothing more than a "dream" character, and that he is instantly whisked away back to his "dimension" while pleading to his friend to remain in Phantomile.
• Kraven Manor: You manage to defeat William Kraven by destroying the orbs binding his soul and the souls of his victims to the mannequins and seemingly condemn Kraven to hell, but just before you can flee the burning manor, you're struck by a piece of debris and knocked out. When you awaken, you find yourself in Kraven's secret lab and discover that you yourself have become a mannequin, and when you look back up, you see Kraven and two of his mannequin minions staring at you. Cue cut to black as your character screams in pure terror. Even the Good Ending is bittersweet at best, and The Bad Guy Wins in both endings.
• The ending of La-Mulana can be seen as this. Mother is unable to return to the heavens. All that can be given to her is the peace of death, in the form of the player. And Lemeza finally gets the treasure, and the power to create life, but in the end, his father steals it from him. La-Mulana 2's backstory seals the deal on Lemeza's end via Harsher in Hindsight: yeah, he saved humanity and all, but he also destroyed a World Heritage Site and the public doesn't believe his reasoning, so he's a wanted criminal.
• The original The Last of Us ends with Joel delivering Ellie to the Fireflies, only to discover that the operation to extract the parasite will kill her. He then kills all the Fireflies standing in his way to save Ellie, thereby destroying any hope of a vaccine to the Cordyceps infection being made. Ellie suspects he's lying when he claims that the Fireflies couldn't make a vaccine, harming their relationship. To make matters worse, his murder of the doctor who'd headed the operation results in the doctor's daughter killing him near the start of the sequel.
• The Legend of Spyro trilogy: The second game had a rather surprising one that clearly indicated to the player this series wasn't going to be all about happy endings. Realizing that he can't win, rather than fighting Malefor and his legions, Spyro opts to protect himself and his two present allies, and let the world fall into ruin around him, only emerging from stasis years later, at the start of the next game. A game which averted its own downer ending at the last second. Spyro and Cynder appear to make a Heroic Sacrifice to save the planet, but after the credits it's revealed they're still alive, somewhere. Still possibly a downer though, as Ignitus is dead or at least removed from the world, the Chronicler is dead and gone, the world is still in bad shape, and Sparx, Spyro's brother, partner, and best friend, may never see him again.
• Lethal Company: Considering it's an Endless Game, it doesn't matter how well you do. At some point, the quota will be so ridiculously high that you and your team will have a hard time meeting it in just three days. And when you do inevitably fail, you're all promptly fired. Into the vacuum of space.
• If you mistook the Alliance Meter in Liar Jeannie In Crucifix Kingdom for a Karma Meter, the ending for freeing fifteen or more humans will catch you off guard. Jeannie becomes the new Cadaver Queen and decides to kill all undead in the kingdom for the sake of humanity, starting with her beloved brother. The ending CG shows that part of her body is now decayed and that she has completely given up on her personal happiness. While the other endings aren't completely happy, they at least ensured that Jeannie would have Marta by her side.
• Library of Ruina, the sequel to Lobotomy Corporation has two, one of which you are guaranteed to get if you haven't cleared all nine Floor Realizations.
  • If you fail to clear the Lower Level realizations, then Angela will finish Roland off after his defeat. In spite of gaining freedom and a human body, she finds herself unwilling to leave the Library, and kills off all of the Sephirah. She then continues to expand the Library for thirteen years, up until a Fixer reaches her and she allows herself to be struck down, rendering her efforts All for Nothing.
  • If you fail to clear the Middle Level realizations, then while Angela forgives Roland for trying to kill her, the feeling is not mutual and Roland decapitates Angela while her back is turned, killing her. He then, having accomplished his revenge, has nothing to live for and, overwhelmed by his trauma, goes deep into substance abuse before being seen dead in a gutter with all sorts of weapons sticking out of his back.
• Life Is Strange gives you two choices for an ending, neither of which is very upbeat:
  • You use the butterfly photo to zip back in time and let your best friend Chloe be murdered in the bathroom by Nathan to prevent Max's Time Master powers from manifesting and the massive storm. Except Max has to listen to Chloe's last moments alive, and as far as Chloe is concerned, she never reunited with Max or learned what happened to Rachel; the last words she ever hears (from her killer) are "Nobody would ever even miss your punk ass, would they?" And she dies absolutely believing it.
  • Oooor, you tear the photo up and spare Chloe, but the storm annihilates Arcadia Bay. It's implied that nearly all of the town's inhabitants were killed, including Chloe's parents and Warren and Kate as well if they survived. The two girls are alive and together, but alone and facing an uncertain future.
• Since Life: the Game is about a man's whole life, you win when he dies of old age. The endings you get by losing range from not so bad (dropping out of school) to terrible (dying as a teenager because your cousin tried to do surgery on you).
• The Sierra adventure game Lighthouse: The Dark Being has what could probably be called a Fridge Downer Ending. In what the developers presumably thought was a happy ending, you capture the otherworldly Big Bad and rescue the main NPC, the inventor Krick and his kidnapped daughter, to eventually bid them farewell back in their home by a cosy fire. However, there are a couple of other implications that the developers apparently never thought of, since Krick vows to destroy the machine he created that links to the fantastical other world. Not only is he abandoning the most spectacular scientific development in history, despite the fact that in rescuing him you made said fantastical world perfectly safe to visit and explore, and you must presumably now return to your mundane existence as an author in this world; more seriously, there's another major NPC, a paraplegic girl in a life-support machine unable to travel, whose former companions were all killed in a tragic accident long before and, without the continued companionship of the player character whom she befriends and helps capture the Big Bad, won't have anything else to do apart from potentially making friends with Martin's Birdman, assuming she's capable of reprogramming him.
• LISA series:
  • Both endings of the first game only serve to reinforce the game's main theme: Lisa can never escape Marty's abuse, no matter what.
  • LISA: The Painful ends with Brad finally reuniting with Buddy, but Buddy reveals she hates him because he not only killed people who genuinely cared for her in his quest to keep her safe, he also heavily sheltered and neglected her. After a tragic and harrowing battle against his party and the Rando Army, Brad succumbs to his wounds and dies, having achieved his goal of protecting Buddy, but at the cost of his friends and his own life. The Stinger reveals that he also turned into a mindless Joy Mutant.
  • LISA: The Joyful's "Join Them" ending has Buddy reject the Joy vaccine and succumb to her hallucinations, becoming a Joy Mutant in the process.
• Live A Live:
  • The only positive thing to come out of the Middle Ages chapter is that Oersted is still breathing (and given what he does next, even that's debatable). Hasshe and Uranus are dead, Streibough betrays Oersted and dies in single combat with him, Oersted's fiancé Alethea declares her love for Streibough and kills herself just to spite Oersted, the king of Lucrece is dead by Oersted's own unwitting hand, and the kingdom at large considers him to be a traitor and demon. This ending is so utterly depressing that Oersted goes completely insane and becomes the Lord of Dark, Odio, who goes on to haunt the other protagonists throughout time and space.
  • Any ending in the game that isn't the good ending or the remake exclusive Golden Ending are this.
    • If Oersted is chosen as the final chapter's protagonist and gets close to losing any of the final battles, Odio will Rage Quit by casting Armageddon, which proceeds to annihilate all of reality. This ending will also happen if any of the other protagonists are chosen and they lose to Purity of Odio (or any version of Odio in the remake).
    • If Oersted is chosen as the final chapter's protagonist and he defeats all the other heroes, he proves to himself that Humans Are Bastards, and is now doomed to be alone in the ruins of Lucrece for presumably the rest of eternity. What's more is that he visibly appears normal instead of his Dark Lord persona and ends his walk by hanging his head in shame, suggesting that he might be finally regretting what he has done but it's too late.
    • If the player chooses to execute Oersted after defeating Purity of Odio, the protagonists end up unable to return to their original times, trapped in the ruins of Lucrece for the rest of their days. Lei's reaction in particular (if she's the successor and chosen as the player character) points out just how much she's screwed up by giving into an impulse of anger and vengeance.
• Given that Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals is a prequel, and the final confrontation was shown at the start of the previous game, anyone who played the first game will know that Maxim and Selan die in the Fortress of Doom after the battle with the Sinistrals. While this was inevitable, the writers decided to make the blow even harder by showing that the comrades they fought alongside throughout the game are totally confident that Maxim and Selan found a way out somehow, and are definitely going to return. The remake Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals has the same ending with a slight change (and better graphics), with Selena (as she was renamed) dying along with Maxim instead of after the original boss fight. Their child, Jeros, still cries when their spirits hover over the city. If you play through the game a second time, however, Erim shows up just before they drive the Dual Blade through the final crystal and you have to fight her. If you win, Maxim and Selena warp away and Erim dies instead. It's her spirit that visits everyone in the second ending. Also, the scene where Jeros cries starts out exactly the same... only Maxim and Selena walk in and Selena holds her baby and comforts him, letting him know mommy's okay.
• Mad Max (2015) somehow manages to have an ending even more depressing than the end of the first movie. You know, where his family was killed and he was left a broken shell of a man? Scrotus brutally murders Hope, with Max arriving too late to save her and Glory dying in his arms, triggering voices and hallucinations that start tormenting Max. Hope's voice drives him to "paint her name in blood" and kill Scrotus, but he ends up destroying the Cool Car you spent the entire game building up into an unstoppable deathmobile and killing Chumbucket in the process. Sure, Max gets his Interceptor back. And sure, with both Scrotus and Stank Gum dead (and potentially everything else Max has done over the course of the game), the territories surrounding Gastown will become safer. But Max himself is right back where he was at the beginning of the game; all alone and with nobody one he can trust, trying to outrace his demons. And he only has himself to blame for it.
• Mafia:
  • Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven: Tommy Angelo testifies against the Salieri family and gets eighty of their members, including The Don Salieri himself, imprisoned or executed. Under witness protection, he and his family get their identities changed, move across the country to a respectable neighborhood, getting a new family life and good job in the process. Fast forward to the 1950s, and an aged Tommy is then shot dead by two assassins, likely sent by Salieri.^note Mafia II reveals that the assassins are Vito and Joe, and were indeed acting on Salieri's orders.
  • Mafia II. By the end of the game, Vito Scaletta has had his mother die while he was in prison, had his sister disown him after he beat up her abusive husband, learned that many of the people he worked with screwed his family over as a child, had his luxurious life destroyed and his friends killed, provoked a gang war between the Mafia and Triads, and lost his friend after he turned pendito. Even worse, even though he is given a deal by Leo Galante to survive despite all the damage done, said deal does not cover his best friend Joe, who is unceremoniously taken away. Mafia III reveals that Vito's deal meant that he was sent to southern Louisiana, where he fails to get any meaningful connections, is disowned by most of the mobs there as a "carpetbagger", and learns that his friend Joe suffered a gruesome death in Chicago. Despite all this, however, Vito can become a successful underboss.
• Manafinder: In the ending where Lambda sides with Illia, Lambda falls to despair over the Settlement's unsustainable barrier and decides that Illia's manastoneless vision for the world is better. She then slaughters everyone in the Settlement in order to destroy their manastones, leaving only the nomads to roam Aevi.
• In Mass Effect 2, it's left entirely up to the player to decide how depressing the ending is. If you make the wrong decisions and send the wrong people in a fit of bad luck in the suicide mission, you can get every member of your team, up to and including Commander Shepard, Killed Off for Real. Cue end cutscene of a sad Joker. However, this ending is more of a non-canon Non-Standard Game Over, as a save file of this ending cannot be transferred to Mass Effect 3.
  • Mass Effect 3's original cut has three major endings, all of which involve the Mass Relays being destroyed, leading to a very uncertain future (if that) for galactic civilization.
  • There remains a scale of endings in ME3, especially in the Extended Cut, which fleshed out a lot of the ending cinematics. Roughly speaking, a Shepard who's done enough groundwork towards Bring Help Back is given three options: Destroy the Reapers, ending the threat for good with no further risks, at the cost of the geth and EDI while possibly living in the process; Control the Reapers, which dissolves Shepard's corporeal form, but makes him/her into the master consciousness of the Reapers, neatly ending the war and giving Shep a giant robot army with which to keep the peace, but with the risk that s/he may become like the Catalyst; or Synthesis, which again kills Shepard but forcefully "rewrites" everyone and everything else, creating new life that is a mixture of organic and synthetic, which convinces the Reapers to end the war (since their supposed long-term goal, to bridge the gap between organic and synthetic, has been accomplished), but keeps them around with only their goodwill to keep them from going crazy again. In addition to that, the husks are no longer evil in the Control and Synthesis endings, and are arguably even alive in the Synthesis one. Taken individually, any of these can be considered bittersweet or even upbeat - or extra horrific, depending on your point of view.
  • On the other hand, if the player's War Assets aren't high enough, the galaxy, the Normandy, and Earth take increasing amounts of damage from the Crucible's activation. If they're particularly low, there are only two options, depending on the player's choice in Mass Effect 2: Control if the base was saved, Destroy if it was destroyed. The worst Control ending is similar to the above, except that collateral damage is more severe. The worst Destroy ending, on the other hand, is unquestionably the biggest Downer Ending of the bunch: Earth is all but incinerated by the blast, the Mass Relays are destroyed, the Normandy is lost, and the galaxy in general is kicked back centuries if not more. But the Reapers were destroyed.
  • The DLC adds yet another possible ending: the "Refusal" ending. Shepard can reject the choices offered by the Catalyst and instead make a speech about freedom to choose, or simply shoot it (which only pisses it off). Either way, the Reapers wipe out all of civilization, and all that's left is a message from Liara in an abandoned bunker begging future civilizations to build the Crucible and succeed where they have failed.
• The Mega Man Legends series ultimately ends with The Bonnes and The Volnutts having finally made friends and teaming up to rescue Mega Man, who is still stranded out in space. Originally this was a Sequel Hook to pave the way for the third game, but it was unfortunately cancelled.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid has a non-canon bad ending in which The Lancer Meryl dies and Snake has a Heroic BSoD as a result.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has one where Naked Snake saves the world but is manipulated into killing his mentor and surrogate mother The Boss in the process, leading to his Start of Darkness as the Well-Intentioned Extremist Big Boss.
• Metro Exodus: In the game's second DLC, Sam's Story, Sam has been on the mission to find a way to leave Russia and head back to his hometown of San Diego in the United States via the U.S.S. Mayflower submarine by Tom. Except, in the ultimate finale of the DLC, he was actually being tricked all along by Tom, when the captain knew about the existence of nukes inside the submarine, which is one reason why one of the nukes has been rigged with bombs. What makes the DLC's ending especially sad is by the fact that both choices, although with different outcomes, seem to border on the sad. Choice A is to blow up Tom's submarine, but Sam completely loses his means of transportation back home to the United States, while saving the world from impending nuclear war by Tom. Choice B is to NOT blow the submarine which gives Sam a transportation back to the United States, but Tom will launch a nuclear war by launching the nukes from the submarine. Either options will both lead to a downer ending.
• In Monster Loves You!:
  • Possible endings include an endless war between humans and monsters, the enslavement or extinction of monsters, and even the extinction of humans. And the game makes it abundantly clear that whatever happens is all your fault.
  • Downplayed in the Modest Legacy/Dissolve Into Mediocrity ending, where you dissolve without standing out in any particular aspect. The game rather bluntly tells you that it's unlikely anybody will remember you now that you're gone.
• Despite the fact that Mortal Kombat: Armageddon canonically ends with Shao Khan winning, it's even a Downer Ending for him. He winds up in a Victory Is Boring situation and is driven mad as a result. It seems the whole franchise truly had no winners, and the alternate timeline of Mortal Kombat 9 could only improve it (as best it could).
• Mother 3 ends with the main protagonist Lucas confronting the Masked Man in a final showdown in order to pull the last needle to awaken a Dragon that will undo the damage done by the big bad. The catch? The Masked Man is Claus, his brother that died early in the game (at the age of nine, incidentally) and was revived as a cyborg by big bad Porky to pull the needles in order to destroy the world, and brainwashed him into commanding his army. Claus slowly regains his senses after his father takes a spell aimed for Lucas, and takes off his helmet to reveal his face. Cue sad music as Claus commits suicide, firing one of his instant kill lightning spells at Lucas (which is reflected by an item that he was wearing) and dies in Lucas' arms, saying that he was glad that he could be with his family before he died. Lucas then pulls the final needle, which ends the earth; the difference in this case being that everyone is implied to survive and that the world will regenerate as it was before Porky's interference. For a game in a series that largely focuses on children fighting absurdist enemies like hippies...
• Naufragar: Crimson: The game ends with Athena dead while Hyo is at full power, having faced no consequences for killing her to absorb her lifeforce.
• The first Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent game ends with the Hidden People kidnapping Isaac Davner, rendering Nelson's struggles to find him and bring him back moot. The government refuses to step in to possibly find him and Nelson is told to leave it to the local law enforcement, not knowing that Sherrif Bahg is a Small-Town Tyrant who won't be looking for Isaac any time soon.
• NieR has four endings. All of them conclude with "humanity is going to go extinct within a decade or so, no avoiding it". Oh, and by the way, it's all your fault. The one exception is NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139..., which has an extra ending where things turn out happily after the protagonists decide to fight for it.
  • NieR: Automata has five main endings. The first two and the final Golden Ending are bittersweet, while other two endings result in the deaths of most (if not all) of the main characters. The other endings in the game are joke endings that, nonetheless, result in death (such as removing your OS chip or eating mackerel) or destruction (running from major battles or killing plot-important characters).
• One of the endings of No More Heroes: if Travis Touchdown doesn't get all the beam katana upgrades, he will end the game with an assassin ready to murder him in his own apartment while he's on the toilet, which immediately cuts to the closing credits. The other, canonical ending plays out the same way, except that Henry kills the assassin and you'll end up fighting him. And in the sequel, it is implied that they stick together.
• Very few of the endings for Not for Broadcast are what could be considered "happy endings", and unless players make the right choices, the ending you'll get will be bittersweet at best, downright bad at worst. Such outcomes include the dictatorial powers that be retaining their power, violent terrorists seizing power, untenable population decline due to a Sterility Plague, civil war, outright societal collapse, and/or every major character (yourself possible included) dying.
• Oakwood ends with all of Madison's friends dead at the hands of the dinosaurs of the forest and she herself is surrounded and mauled to death by the Velociraptor.
• The bad endings in the Oddworld series. The one for Munch’s Oddysee is likely the worst of them all, as Abe and Munch are attacked by the Fuzzles as punishment for not rescuing enough, allowing the Vykkers to capture and kill them. Do even worse and a newspaper shows that everything the duo worked to try to prevent came true: the Gabbiar was sold and consumed, the Glukkon Queen got her new lungs (from Munch’s body, might we add), and the remaining Mudokons are being returned to slavery with their hatchlings forced to join them.
• OFF has two endings, and both are smiliarly bitter-tasting. The only difference between being in one, the shopkeeper Zacharie, the Judge, a single Elsen, and MAYBE a drugged-out Sugar are the only survivors in a barren and broken world. In the other ending, most of the world's inhabitants have been killed at the hands of the Batter, and whatever remained is destroyed by the Batter pulling the switch.
• In Operation Flashpoint, the main character, David Armstrong, gets sent to a desolate island in the middle of nowhere, has his all friends massacred by the Soviets (twice), and generally has a pretty awful experience. The game's epilogue, however, states that the entire incident between the US and USSR was passed off by Moscow and Washington as a "misunderstanding", the Everon War being given a small footnote in an obscure military history book. Seems all his friends died for nothing in the end, and were completely forgotten.
• Orwell has you spend the entire game spying on the members of a terrorist group known as Thought and uploading their personal information to a database known as Orwell. You learn that their leader once worked for the government and you're ordered to stop investigating further. If you ignore the warnings and proceed anyway, but decide to continue with your mission after learning the truth, the terrorists are arrested but you're branded as a traitor and have a warrant for your arrest. Alternatively, you can reveal Orwell's existence to the world and get it shut down, but the ending implies it'll still be used under the table.
• Outcast: Your skeptic hero is fighting The Dragon in an all-out battle in the palace gardens. After dispatching him and his mooks, the ending cut-scene begins. Your semi-love-interest comes around as the hero is going up the stairs to face the Big Bad. Cue love interest getting shot by a cloaking pack-wearing Big Bad. What follows is the god destroying the palace and dragging the main boss down with it. The game ends with a eulogy and funeral service for your love interest, and a sad hero returning to Earth. Accompanied by one of the saddest pieces of game music ever (Heaven on Adelpha by Lennie Moore).
• The Outer Worlds: If the player chooses to side with the Board and help them gain total control over the Halcyon system, the colonists still trapped on the Hope will be jettisoned into space and killed, the laborers currently living in Halcyon will be forced into cryostasis chambers, and the colonies in the system will fall into ruin.
• Outlast concludes with protagonist Miles Upshur failing to escape Mount Massive Asylum, instead becoming the new vessel of the Walrider. Miles' counterpart in the Whistleblower DLC fares much better, and does manage to extract some good from Miles' sacrifice. It is still implied that even the Whistleblower ends up with a Bittersweet Ending, since the DLC hero sacrifices the safety of himself and his loved ones to expose the evil corporation for what it is.
• Papers, Please has 20 different endings, only three of which are good endings. Most of the rest are early bad endings, usually for things like going into debt, letting your entire family die, or shooting an innocent or a government official when you're supposed to be shooting active terrorists, and some of them are Bittersweet Endings where you flee the country, whether alone or only with some of your living family. But then there's the ending where you make it to the final day, but then the next day, a government audit exposes your involvement with the terrorist-slash-freedom-fighter group EZIC, and you are subsequently executed for your involvement. A more twisted version of this can occur should the player be otherwise locked into the "EZIC revolution" ending (wherein the player has completed enough of EZIC's missions for them to complete their takeover of the government) but then kills the EZIC agents attacking the border at the last minute, in which case the above ending happens and an EZIC agent hands you a note condemning you for betraying them at the last minute, leaving you to die hated by both groups.
• The Park ends with Lorraine being driven to the brink of madness by the park's emotion-siphoning machines and nearly going the same way as Chad the Chipmunk; she recovers enough of her sanity to try and rescue Callum from the House of Horrors - only for the Bogeyman to seize control of her and force her to stab her child to death with an icepick. For good measure, Lorraine eventually hands herself over to the police, ensuring that the Bogeyman/Nathaniel Winter's crimes will go unpunished. And given that the game's actually a tie-in with The Secret World, it's soon revealed that things only get worse for Lorraine: she ends up getting press-ganged into becoming an agent of the Council of Venice and is forcibly bonded with one of the Bees, subjecting her to daily Mind Rape as a result of the unwilling symbiosis. By this time, she wants desperately to die, but thanks to the Bee, she can't, sending her on a thirty-year mission to successfully commit suicide. And when she finally manages it over the course of "The Seven Silences," there's a good indication that the player ends up undoing it, forcing her back into a lifestyle of indentured servitude and crippling depression.
• In Perfect Vermin, the news castor has to come with terms that he is dying as a result of his smoking habit and realizing he will never catch his big break because there simply is not enough time left for him and his life will be forgotten. Given that the game starts with an In Memoriam tribute to him, he died after the game's events.
• Persona:
  • At the end of Persona, if the player doesn't answer Mai's questions correctly, she'll kidnap Ideal Maki causing the real Maki to die as a result. In the Snow Queen route, if the player doesn't collect enough Mirror Shards Nyx destroys the school and creates an eternal night.
  • Persona 2: Innocent Sin is even worse. The heroes fail to prevent the world (aside from Sumaru) from blowing up, and Maya, who they all idolized, dies. Instead of dealing with the state of this world, Philemon gives the surviving heroes a chance to create a separate universe where things didn't go wrong...but while that means their lives would be improved, especially Jun's, it also means none of these five would ever have met, at least not prior to 1999. Even worse, unlike every other Persona example, this isn't a Bad Ending; it's the ending, full stop. Meaning all you did was for nothing. Fun. At least Eternal Punishment is better. It's implied in Innocent Sin that all you did wasn't entirely for nothing; that much level grinding and fighting monsters made your will strong enough to create that new reality as a new middle finger to Nyarlathotep (apparently, the Reset Button was really hard to press). Of course, aside from the better ending provided above, Eternal Punishment just renders that ending moot and a further downer, because that's Nyarly's plan all along.
  • If you choose to kill Ryoji Mochizuki in Persona 3, the characters' memories are erased so that they won't have to fear the Fall, and can live their lives as ordinary high school students happily until everyone dies. And the canon ending has the protagonist sacrifice himself to seal Nyx away. Persona 4 revealed that Igor's former assistant Elizabeth left to find a way to bring him back, but she doesn't seem to have had much luck so far.
  • Persona 4, in the bad ending, if you choose to throw Namatame into the television, therefore killing him, your adorable cousin Nanako STAYS dead. In the Neutral Ending, if you don't throw him into the television but also don't convince the rest of the Investigation Team to keep investigating, then Nanako comes back to life, in stable condition but is still in the hospital months later, unable to truly recover. In both of these endings, Teddie disappears, his whereabouts unknown, and goes back into the Television world. If you choose three wrong suspects, it'll have the same outcome as Neutral Ending. Golden adds in one more ending...where in one of the endings for Adachi's Social Link, when you figure out that he's the killer, you cover up for him and bring about The End of the World as We Know It alongside him.
  • If you fail to convince your interrogator to trust you in Persona 5, whether by failing to complete the dungeons in time (which results in the protagonist having a false recollection of the terrible consequences of his failure), or answering some questions incorrectly, she concludes that you're too addled from the drugs to give an honest answer and leaves, at which point the protagonist is sadistically murdered by Akechi in a graphic, bloody manner. The whole incident is then swept under the rug as a suicide. There's also another bad ending if you choose to accept the offer made by the Greater-Scope Villain to let him carry out his plan in exchange for keeping your power.
  • The Nonstandard Game Over scenes from failing to complete a dungeon before a deadline also qualify. In order: Kamoshida expels you and Ryuji, thus causing you to violate your probation and go to jail while Ann is left behind to be victimized by Kamoshida. Madarame reports you for trespassing and has you arrested while Yusuke continues to suffer under his thumb. Kaneshiro leaks the blackmail pictures of you and your classmates after Makoto is kidnapped, drugged, and forced into prostitution. The fake Medjed leaks your identity onto the Internet and inadvertently causes Sojiro to be arrested as well for harboring you. In the next two the police receive a tip regarding your identity (most likely from Akechi), but in the first one Haru is forced into an Arranged Marriage as well. The final one has Akechi discovering that you faked your death and arresting you in your home. All of them, except for the final one since the story has progressed past the interrogation at that point, end with you being murdered in the interrogation room by Akechi. The Royal edition adds another one for the extra January dungeon. If you don't complete it within the deadline, Maruki's fusion of Mementos and the real world becomes permanent, and Maruki meets with the protagonist in a dream. Figuring that Joker's inability to make a decision is because of sheer stress, Maruki takes the choice out of his hands by removing his motivation to do anything other than sleep. When the protagonist wakes up, his phone's battery is long dead, and his room is riddled with cobwebs. He has no more will or motivation to get out of bed or even think, and just goes back to sleep. Lavenza tries to reach him but can't, as Maruki also cost Joker his rebellious spirit.
  • Royal has another bad ending should you choose to accept Maruki’s reality. At first, it doesn’t seem any different than something you’d find in a typical Fix Fic, where everyone is happy, Joker getting to stay with Sojiro until he graduates, Makoto and Haru happily graduating while Futaba, Yusuke, and the now human Morgana decide to go to Shujin as well. As everyone poses for a group picture, you almost forget that they’re trapped in a Crapsaccharine World where free will is nonexistent while under Maruki’s thumb. Even worse, it’s implied Joker and Akechi are aware of this but have been rendered completely unable to do anything about it. Oh yeah, and Sumire is mentally dead with her identity as Kasumi completely taking over.
• Phantasy Star II: The End of the Lost Age. The subtitle isn't there just for kicks: sure, you destroy Mother Brain and save the human population of Motavia. But Mother Brain destroys Palm in the midgame (along with the majority of the Algol system's population), your destruction of Mother Brain also destroys the technological base that Algol's society depends upon, the original problem that set you off on your quest (biomonsters being released on Motavia) is still unsolved (and will still be unsolved a thousand years later), and the ending has you killing the last survivors of Earth, possibly dying in the process. This is not a happy story.
• Planescape: Torment, for every possible ending. Best case scenario, you revive all your friends, send them to Sigil and then go to the lower planes to suffer for all eternity for crimes committed by past incarnations. Alternatively, you can kill your mortality, leaving all your friends (save, possibly, one) still thoroughly dead, and you very likely facing oblivion. So oblivion or hell, no matter how nice you've been the entire game.
• You get these if you die in a wave in Portal Defenders. Dying in wave 3 might count as a Bittersweet Ending, though, because even though you die, the enemies all end up killing each other anyways.
• Pretentious Game. The first game ends with Blue losing Magenta, whom he loves, to Gray, and the second game ends with Blue getting killed by a drunk driving Gray. What makes the second game's ending worse is that Blue had just found love again with Peach.
• Prince of Persia (2008) has Elika dying, and the Prince screwing the world over to bring her back. It gets points for being a Sequel Hook, though, the game's 'proper' ending in the Epilogue DLC doesn't end things on a much better note. Namely, Elika hates the Prince for bringing her back and setting Ahriman free, soon nowhere will be safe from his touch and the Corruption, and after successfully navigating the Temple to the lands beyond that are (currently) untouched by Ahriman, Elika tells the Prince he can do what he likes and then abandons him to go find her missing people.
• Produce: Toshio's deal with the Entity ends with the latter screwing the former over by assimilating Sayaka into it — when the whole point of Toshio's deal was to win her love.
• Professor Layton and the Unwound Future has a particularly tragic one. Throughout the game, there are flashbacks to Professor Layton's earlier years, where he was in love with a woman named Claire. Sadly, Claire was killed in an accident involving an experimental time machine. He does, however, later meet her younger sister. Near the end of the game, he finds out that the woman isn't her younger sister — it's Claire herself, flung forward in time ten years by the same time machine that killed her. However, she can't remain in this time period because it would cause a paradox. The ending is Layton begging her to stay, giving up all pretense of gentlemanly composure in favor of Inelegant Blubbering, while she slowly fades away only to reappear in the midst of a fatal explosion. She gives him one last kiss before fading forever, and our final shot is Layton taking off his hat and crying into the snow.
• Project Zomboid has no rescue or cure to the zombie plague. The developers repetitively stated that the point of the game is to show how you've died, but no matter what, you will die.
• Every single ending in Psychic Force is really depressing if you like the word 'justice to the world'. Characters suffer/fail in their mission and/or get killed, the world just got worse. (Except probably Wendy in the sequel, which is more or less a Bittersweet Ending).
• Punch-Out!! for the Wii has one, and it's terribly depressing. If Little Mac loses 3 matches in the mode "Mac's Last Stand", he will keep his word in retiring from boxing for good. The game then shows Doc Louis in a room that shows various photos of Little Mac's victories over the boxers he faced. Doc Louis then rings the bell on the bike that was Little Mac's. If that wasn't enough, Doc Louis looks up at a photo of him and Mac during their training, saying to himself that he is proud of Mac. And just to make sure that the point is driven home, players cannot play the career section in their profile since it is literally "retired."
• The Quest of Ki ends with Druaga splitting the Blue Crystal Rod into three and turning Ki into a rock. Since this is a prequel to The Tower of Druaga, it is rectified in that game when Druaga is defeated and Gil restores Ki to her original form.
• Radiant Silvergun has the mothership Penta being taken over by the Stone-Like, and everyone is killed except the quirky robot Creator, who resurrects the 2 main characters through cloning, and keeping the Stable Time Loop happening indefinitely.
• In Raiden V's bad ending, our heroes return to the solar system after destroying the crystal aliens at the source, but they appear to have accidentally warped to Mars at first. A closer examination reveals that it is Earth All Along, reduced to a lifeless red rock by the Alien Invasion.
• So you just beat Ratchet And Clank Future Toolsof Destruction. You met a girl with some funny robots, turned some baddies into penguins, fought space pirates, and just defeated the fascist, omnicidal Big Bad who tried to destroy the universe with the Always Chaotic Evil race he brought back. It should be a cause for celebration. Then the ending cutscene starts: Ratchet, Clank, Qwark, Talwyn, Cronk, Zephyr, and Rusty Pete are chilling at the Apogee Space Station when suddenly Clank is taken away by the alien race that helped him earlier in the game and Ratchet is unable to save him. The final shot before the credits is of Ratchet looking up in utter despair as his friends go to comfort him. It turned out to be a plot hook for the next two entries, but it still doesn't reduce the impact of the scene, especially as it is the only game in the franchise to end on such a depressing note.
• Rayman Raving Rabbids: Rayman escapes, but the many baby Globoxes are still captives of the sinister yet phenomenally stupid rabbits, and then Rayman's attempt to go back and rescue them is brought to an abrupt halt when he gets stuck in the hole.
• All three installments of the RAY Series count:
  • RayForce ends with the heroine's fighter being destroyed in the wreckage after destroying Con-Human, which causes the Earth to explode.
  • RayStorm's Extra Mode seems to be a Bittersweet Ending due to the enemy forces and their billions of inhabitants being destroyed by having their space colony — with a population of 7 billion humans — dropped into the sun, but if you're playing on the 13-Ship Mode, the ending goes From Bad to Worse, as you get this ending text after the end credits:
    Earth and Secilia have vanished. Likewise, those that developed the "RAY" technology and all evidence of its existence have been wiped away. No record of R-GRAY craft was found, and no R-GRAY craft has ever returned.
  • RayCrisis, being a prequel to RayForce, has you going into Con-Human's core and you fighting and defeating Dis-Human and its core Infinity, only to find that the damage that Con-Human has caused has already been done, thus necessitating the events of RayForce.
• In Red Dead Redemption, after struggling across New Austin and Mexico to safeguard his family's future, John Marston sacrifices himself in a futile stand off with the US Army, buying just enough time for his wife and son to escape impending slaughter. In the same climactic battle, Uncle, another member of the Marston family, gives his life, and three years later, Abigail, John's wife, dies. Following his mother's death, (the adult) "Jack" Marston seeks out, duels, and kills the man who forced his father's execution, Edgar Ross. Satisfying as this revenge might at first sound, it means that Jack has taken up the very lifestyle that his father was trying to protect him from.
  • In Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, the game world is ravaged by the undead. John risks everything to return a cursed mask to an Aztec burial site to stop the plague. Shortly thereafter, he dies as predicted by the main game, and Seth steals the mask again, restarting the Zombie Apocalypse. And Then John Was a Zombie, but completely unintelligible, with no family, and no way to stop the current apocalypse.
  • The game's prequel, Red Dead Redemption II has a new protagonist from John's old crew, Arthur Morgan who was never mentionned in the original game and who's fate is thus a Foregone Conclusion. The player at least get to choose how he dies, granting him the chance to witness an ultimate sunrise, or getting him stabbed in the back.
  • The game's epilogue counts as one as well, as John's fulfliling his vendetta against Micah is the nail in the coffin that leads Ross back to his trail and sets the events of the first game on track.
• Red Earth: Both Tessa and Leo have downer endings if you screw up, involving being hypnotized by an extraterrestrial creature and succumbing to his curse and becoming a mindless lion, respectively. As for Kenji, both of his endings are unpleasant, either dying with honor or living in disgrace. Thankfully, Mai Ling will always end her campaign on a positive note.
• The ending of Siter Skain's RefleX was this or bittersweet at best.
• Resistance 2 plays this extremely straight. The game ends with the main protagonist Nathan Hale finishing his transformation into a Chimera and even repeats the very first line you hear from the game's Big Bad. You also see a large mysterious Chimeran object or building in the background and many Chimeran air-crafts off in the distance. Joe Capelli then tells Hale "I'm sorry sir. It was an honor." (a complete change from his earlier attitude towards him) and shoots Hale in the head, killing him. The entire scene also implies that the Chimera have defeated the human race, which the setting for Resistance 3 confirms.
• Road of the Dead: Congratulations! You escaped from the zombie-infested city before it got nuked! Too bad the nuke doesn't do a damn thing to stop the zombies.
• The ending of Robotech: Battlecry: The game is narrated by your character. At the end of the next-to-last mission, the Zentradi ship husk that acts as the backdrop for the fight suddenly engages a space-fold, taking the enemy fleet and you... to Saturn. The last mission is in space, where you finally kill the Big Bad Zeraal. And then you find out that all of your narration is just your character's final minutes, recording how he got there as he runs out of oxygen.
• Rule of Rose: It is revealed that Jennifer is the sole survivor of an airship crash, and the entire game was her literally reliving her traumatic childhood memories. Everyone else, including her beloved dog Brown, is actually dead. And even worse, if not getting the good variant of the ending, then it is implied that she is stuck in that trauma, having to relive it again and again.
• Sabres of Infinity has a fair number:
  • If you fail to reach lieutenant rank after completing patrol and reserve duty, you will be considered a lost case by their superiors and sent back to Tierra to live a boring life of obscurity, with nothing to show for your military career.
  • If you report Captain Lefebvre to Major Hunter for sanctioning illegal anti-partisan activity, and fail to convince Hunter of your claims, you will be cashiered for slandering a superior officer and sent home in disgrace.
  • If the player is disgraced by deserting in the final battle, they are left a pistol by their superiors with the implication that committing suicide is the only escape from their shame; the player can choose to take this option.
• Sacred Earth - Alternative: Despite the demo implying that things will eventually get better for Konoe as she discovers her past and gains a chance to save the remains of the world, the full release ends on a bleak note. Konoe discovers that the memories she saw belong to the original Konoe, and then True Konoe kills her, rendering all the pain she went through moot. Then True Konoe fails in her own objective to revive her family, making the destruction of the world All for Nothing. Worse yet, the Celestial Tree that she summoned has the potential to destroy the rest of the multiverse.
• Saints Row ends with your character supposedly dying in a boat explosion, shortly after reaching his goal of helping his gang take over the entire city. To make matters worse, in the second game, you learn that one of your best friends organized the whole thing. Also, in Saints Row: The Third, where you get to choose between two endings — one of them involves letting two of the player character's friends die in a conspiracy plot, intended to make the Saints appear as terrorists. However, this is more of a Bittersweet Ending, as the Saints return to their old ways (from the second game), and declare Steelport an independent state.
• Samurai Shodown IV had a time limit for defeating Amakusa. If the player fails to reach or beat Amakusa before the time limit, their character dies when his castle suddenly explodes. The epilogue states that although Amakusa was killed as well, the devastation he wrought upon Japan was extensive.
• Scorn: After spending the entire game evading and killing monsters, nativating the Death World, ridding his body of the Parasite, and mutilating other sentient creatures as well as his own body, "Scorn Guy" is attacked by the Parasite mere meters away from reaching salvation. The Parasite permanently latches itself back onto "Scorn Guy's" body and traps him inside of an organic cocoon, all while "Scorn Guy" is still conscious and can do nothing but stare ahead knowing he'll be stuck like this for the rest of his life.
• In the old Color Dreams NES game Secret Scout in the Temple of Demise, upon finally defeating Doctor Demise and getting through this turkey of a game, your final reward is a text screen that seems like A Winner Is You, but is anything but:
  "Congratulations, Secret Scout! You've managed to kill off Doctor Demise and his band of scum-sucking cohorts! Unfortunately, the exit from the Temple has been covered up with a thick layer of hardened pewter and boulder fragments. It would be a miracle if you got out! I'll notify your next of kin right away. Thanks a million for your brave efforts!"
• The games of Shadow Hearts series each have a "good ending" and a "bad ending":
  • In the first game's bad ending, Alice dies to the Four Masks' Curse. It's canon for the sequel, by the way.
  • In Covenant the bad ending means that Yuri's memories and personality are fully devoured by the curse of the Holy Mistletoe, leaving him a vacant shell. In the good ending, he chooses to die with his memories intact, but gets to return to the past and, presumably, save Alice.
  • In the bad ending for From the New World, Shania becomes completely corrupted by Malice, and looks more than ready to use it to cause havoc.
  • The bad ending achieved from losing against the final boss in Koudelka after getting the titular heroine's pendant will lead to James committing a Heroic Sacrifice in order to subdue her. Like the bad ending of the original Shadow Hearts, this ending is canon, and also leads to the game's story.
• Shadow Man ends with the main character being trapped in the land of the dead, unable to return to the land of the living. Not as much of a downer ending as you'd expect though, since the narration suggests that he's happy about it, and it was immediately undone in the sequel, where the first thing Mike does is recover Luke's teddy bear that lets him return to Liveside after it had been lost following Asylum's destruction.
• Shovel Knight: King Of Cards has King Knight betraying everyone he allied with, dooming the land, kicking out father-figure King Pridemoor while forever shaming his mother, after learning that the titular "King of Cards" reward was a sham, and getting sick of shoulder-bashing for people who don't even help him fight and even King Knight himself seems ashamed of alienating his mother, and is trying to bury it in his victory. The epilogue ends with Shovel Knight confronting him, making everything he did All for Nothing.
• Silent Hill:
  • The first Silent Hill had two downer endings, one with Harry and Cybil trapped in Hell together, the other being the famous Dying Dream ending. Both Bad Endings have somber credits music (different from the good endings) to go with them, but the worst ending has a vocal ending theme, "Esperandote" ("waiting for you" in Spanish).
  • Silent Hill 2 has three downer endings (one of which is a secret ending). Specifically, in one ending the main character, James, commits suicide, in another he leaves the town accompanied by a sinister simulacrum of his dead wife who might be dying of the same disease she suffered, and in the secret ending he is seen rowing his dead wife's corpse to an island on the middle of a lake, with the declared intent of invoking the dark powers of the town in order to bring her back to life. But if you do things just right, he does get out okay, by choosing forgiveness and moving on. Even Laura is implied to have forgiven him.
  • One of the endings of Silent Hill 3 involves Heather failing to kill the God, instead becoming possessed by it and shooting Douglas.
  • Three of the endings in Silent Hill 4: Henry moves back into his still-haunted apartment, Eileen dies, or Walter completes his 21 sacraments and both of the protagonists die.
  • And the movie ending: Alessa merges with Sharon, then she and Rose leave Silent Hill, but are still stuck in the other dimension where no one can see them, which can imply that the Dark Alessa has expanded the "nightmare" beyond just Silent Hill. How's that for a Downer Ending, having a vengeful, bordering-on-demonic spirit expanding her reality-warping, nightmarish anger and hatred over the whole world? There's a reason why people call this game "the scariest game ever", simply because the implications seen throughout the series are very depressing.
  • The first game's remake, Shattered Memories: all of the endings are a variation on the Dying Dream ending. One ending shows that the entire time, Harry was a weak guy who was abused by his wife, one shows that Harry was a worthless drunk the whole time, and another shows that he was a proud adulterer. Although, in the last two, Cheryl makes up with her mother. Thankfully, it's also possible and likely to get the rather heartwarming Love Lost ending, where Harry and Dahlia peacefully divorce and assure Cheryl that they both still love her, but just can't stay married to each other anymore.
• Both the normal and Golden Ending of Sine Mora. The Enkies end up dead, Lynthe Ytoo spends the rest of his life in jail, Myryan Magusa dies of cancer, Argus kills his own father and decides to rebel against the empire by traveling back in time, piloting the Cobalt King and refusing to deliver the nuke.
• Singularity. You have three endings to pick from, and none of them restore the original timeline.
  • Killing Barisov results in Renko becoming Demichev's Dragon and helping him solidify his rule over the world. Eventually, Demichev becomes jealous of his new protege and sets up a new seat of power in North America, resulting in a world divided between two dictatorships.
  • Killing Demichev results in Renko going back to 1955 and correcting his original mistake (saving Demichev). At first, things seem to have gone back to normal as the game replays the helicopter ride sequence from the beginning. However, this time the helicopters bear hammer and sickle insignias and there's a statue of Barisov in the distance, implying that Soviet Union still controls the world.
  • Killing both Barisov and Demichev results in Demichev's empire falling into chaos while Renko takes over the former United States as a military dictator.
• Skullgirls features Downer Endings for most of the game's main default cast (the endings for the DLC characters tend to end on happier notes):
  • Filia asks the Skull Heart to give Carol (aka: Painwheel) a shot at a normal life. The wish was mostly selfless: it was tainted by Filia's own wish for redemption. Hence, she would become the next Skullgirl. On the bright side, though, her transformation would be slow, so she gets to see Carol have the normal life she deserved.
  • Cerebella finds the Skull Heart. Ms. Fortune finds her and attacks, boasting that the Life Gem would allow her to survive anything Cerebella throws at her. Cerebella uses Vice-Versa's super strength to crush Ms. Fortune until she is completely and utterly destroyed, recovering the Life Gem in the process. With both the Skull Heart and the Life Gem, she wins Vitale's favor, but feels tremendous guilt over killing Ms. Fortune.
  • Peacock is forced to fight and destroy Marie, the Skullgirl. Before she dies, the two former friends have a friendly exchange, and Peacock vows to continue Marie's war against the Medici crime family.
  • Parasoul wishes upon the Skull Heart to spare her sister Umbrella from ever becoming a Skullgirl. Her wish is granted, but in time, Parasoul would become the next Skullgirl. Parasoul decides to use what time she has left to train Umbrella to fight her once she transforms...
  • Painwheel wrists free from Brain Drain's control and destroys the Skull Heart. She tries to return to her family, but is shunned because of how hideous she became as a result of Lab Zero's experiments on her. She sulkily returns to Brain Drain, but promises the man who turned her into a monster: "You're next!"
  • Valentine reaches a dead end upon defeating the Skullgirl. Knowing that no good could come of wishing for her friends from Last Hope back to life, she asks the Skull Heart to make her the next Skullgirl. She vanishes along with the Skull Heart, leaving an unmasked Painwheel to take up Valentine's bonesaw...
  • Ms. Fortune decides not to wish her old gang back to life, finding peace with her new friends back in Little Innsmouth. However, when she returns back home she finds out that the Medici mafia has kidnapped many of the residents in town, mostly all being children. She meets up with Irvin, Big Band's old partner, and agrees to help him investigate the situation as the game shows Black Dahlia, one of the Medici mafias most dangerous enforcers, holding the children hostage at gun point.
  • During the course of Eliza's story, she takes Ms. Fortune prisoner, murders Cerebella in cold blood, then destroys the Skull Heart. When Filia and Squigly ambush her in her own nightclub, she's far too powerful for them to stop thanks to all the blood she took from Gehenna, and takes them both prisoner as well. She then turns into a gigantic blood monster and marches on Medici Tower, declaring war on them. It's a classic case of The Bad Guy Wins. Only this time, you're playing the bad guy.
• Of the four games in the Sly Cooper series, only the first has a happy ending. Despite Clock-La's death, Sly 2: Band of Thieves is a complete Downer Ending with Bentley becoming crippled and Murray leaving the gang before the events of Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, blaming himself for what happened to his friend. In particular, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time ends with Sly himself missing in action, his friends looking for him, and Penelope escaping from prison. The secret ending reveals that he's in Ancient Egypt, which would've made it a mere cliffhanger if not for the fact that Sanzaru Games has stated they will not make a sequel. The fandom did not take that well.
• Somari's ending is implied to be this, given that Dr. Robotnik has all of the chaos emeralds. As they only appear in the ending and there's no way to collect them in game, Failure Is the Only Option.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The bad ending to the 8-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. You fail to rescue Tails from Eggman, who gets away scot-free. The ending shows Sonic running in a darker environment than what is shown in the best ending until the credits end, showing Sonic looking up in the sky, seeing Tails' figure. Many interpret this ending as Tails having been killed by Eggman.
  • The bad ending from Knuckles Chaotix manages to one-up this by leaving out any ambiguity of the villain's actions. If you fail to gather the Chaos Rings, the game will immediately cut to a scene of Metal Sonic destroying the island and hovering over a burning city while horrifying music plays.
• SOS has quite a few bad endings in which no one survives the rescue. If you see the ending picture have a black sky, you've got a bad ending.
• Choose either ending of the Demon Path of Soul Nomad & the World Eaters. Having the protagonist sealed in the Onyx Blade is the lesser of two evils, mind you.
• The end of Spec Ops: The Line. Everyone in Dubai is doomed to a slow painful death by dehydration, both Lugo and Adams are killed (along with basically every named character in the game), and depending on the ending you pick: Walker has become a shellshocked mess wandering aimlessly in the desert; Walker is shot dead trying to kill a rescue squad; Walker is detained and probably court-martialed/commited to an asylum; or, failing the above, Walker has shot himself in despair. As a bonus, the truth of what happened in Dubai might still get out, causing the entire Middle East to declare war on the US and most likely win, though the possibility of this particular thing happening is implied to be the delusions of a man suffering the same sort of Sanity Slippage Walker was.
• Spinal Breakers has multiple endings, and the worst one involves the hero Captain Waffle defeating the final boss and being forced to shoot his wife and daughter, who have become infected. Then at the end of the credits roll, we hear one final gunshot.
• Spirit Hunter series:
  • The bad ending of Spirit Hunter: Death Mark, where at least one Mark Bearer dies. The protagonist fails to properly seal the Big Bad and she comes for him at the end.
  • Spirit Hunter: NG:
    • The Bad End, predictably. All of Akira's companions are dead. The grief overwhelms him, as does his Bloodmetry power, until a mysterious voice offers her help. However, his Bloodmetry is too powerful even for her, and he's turned into a murderous Spirit that kills the last few survivors that he cared for.
    • The 'Normal' End is actually pretty dismal- because one or more of Akira's companions were killed, their grudge manifests as them preventing the Nagoshi no Gi ritual from working. This leads to Kakuya (rather gruesomely) possessing Seiji or Kaoru and having them drag Akira into Kakuriyo, where it's implied that Kakuya kills him (hopefully, because the alternative isn't much better). And since the ritual was imperfect, it's only a matter of time before Kakuya escapes again.
  • Much like the previous game, Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II's bad ending involves the protagonist failing to figure out the Big Bad's true identity, resulting in his death.
• Splatterhouse:
  • The first game ends with the protagonist, Rick Taylor, giving his back to the burned-down remains of the titular house, after having to kill his Damsel in Distress girlfriend possessed by an ugly grand-guignolesque demon and probably scarred for life. The Mask of Terror, which helps him on his quest only to try to kill him at the end (releasing from a tomb the Final Boss) and which he broke to pieces, just puts itself back together with a nasty cackle. In Splatterhouse 2, we learn that Rick still has the power to bring his girlfriend back to life by returning to the mansion from the first game by literally fighting hell itself to save her.
  • Splatterhouse 3 has three downer endings, where Rick loses one or both of his wife and son, and one good ending where he saves both and destroys the Mask forever, depending on whether or not the player beat the stage-specific time limits. Thankfully, Namco confirmed that none of the bad endings are canon.
• Splinter Cell: Double Agent has several:
  • Enrica being killed by one of Fisher's own men. He kills the agent and is now on the run from his own agency.
  • Either Sam loses it and sides with the JBA, becoming a terrorist, Sam retains his sanity but gets caught for terrorism and put into a trial he cannot possibly win, or Sam retains his sanity and utterly destroys the JBA, but also loses all contact with the NSA, forcing him to go underground until such time that he can prove his innocence...which may never happen. None are particularly happy, but some are at least slightly more hopeful than others.
• No matter which ending you get in Spookys Jumpscare Mansion, Spooky will always come out on top. That said, it’s Played for Laughs.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl: After 20 hours of wandering the Zone, killing mutants, shutting down machines that destroy people's minds and barely surviving, you finally approach the Wish Granter and make a wish, and then either die in a horrible way, or go blind, depending on your actions throughout the game. There is a better ending, too, but many players get too frustrated by the Wish Granter endings to even try and play the game any more. All the Wishgranter endings are downers, as is the bad ending from the true final area. The true ending, though, is a Happy Ending. Until Call of Pripyat, the direct sequel to that true ending, where you see that the Zone got out of control and is hell.
• The Terran and Protoss campaigns in the original StarCraft certainly qualify: In the Terran campaign, Raynor helps Mengsk defeat the Confederacy, only to see him become a tyrant and war criminal as evil as the Confederates. At the end of the Protoss campaign, the Overmind is dead, but their homeworld is a smoldering crater and still swarming with newly rampaging Zerg.
  • The expansion pack, Brood War is a classic example by any standards. The game ends with the Zerg triumphant, the Protoss and Terrans scattered (in the final cutscene the Terran commander shoots himself, having penned a farewell note to his wife back on Earth) and most of the characters who could loosely be classified as "good guys", either dead or having abandoned the fight.
• Star Fox Command has the following:
  • The ending The Anglar Emperor has Krystal ditch Fox so she can continue her life with Star Wolf. Fox is forced to wander the galaxy on his own, although he MIGHT have ROB-NUS 64, Falco, and/or Slippy as company.
  • In The Curse Of Pigma, Fox suffers a Heroic BSoD when he realises that his rival Wolf had taken everything from him. Falco tries to console him, but his attempts fail. It is only when Falco gets wind of a race that Fox recovers from his sadness.
  • In Pigma's Revenge, Falco decides to defect when Fox reveals that he and his friends have defeated the Anglar Emperor on their own. Falco gets back at Fox by joining Dash and Katt to form Star Falco.
  • Dash Makes A Choice ends with Corneria and Venom battling when Dash takes over Venom in his grandfather's footsteps and declares it as the "centre of the Lylat System".
• Star Warrior II: If the player tells Emilio about Vie, this leads to Vie going back to the base. Unfortunately, the Cosmic Darkness fully assimilates her and kills everyone in the base, and then forces the party into a deep slumber.
• Star Wars:
  • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
    • The main character abandons everyone that cares about her and sail off alone into uncharted space to wage a futile battle against an ancient, omnipotent evil empire alongside the hero of the first game. And the redeemed Mandalorians? Doomed (in about 4000 years). Mira dies in a Heroic Sacrifice after helping the other party members restore the Jedi Order, Visas' planet is still dead, and Czerka's still dicking around (for now). That's the good ending, and in Star Wars: The Old Republic things just got worse for them from there.
    • The Dark Side ending. In The Exile's absence half your party become aimless Serial Killers wreaking havoc wherever they go (unless you got them all killed) while Dantooine lies in ruins, Czerka's influence turns Telos into a Wretched Hive, Nar Shaddaa becomes an even worse one than it already was with Goto's absence creating an Evil Power Vacuum, and The Republic as a whole is on the verge of collapse while the Jedi remain extinct.
  • Star Wars: Republic Commando: The squad successfully completes the mission, but at the last moment Sev is attacked by an overwhelming number of enemies and goes MIA. The Squad was going to go after him, but the higher orders forced them to fall back and leave him. His fate isn't resolved to date.
  • In the "Ultimate Revenge of the Sith" alternate ending of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith Vader kills Obi-Wan, and Palpatine declares that there is none left to oppose them (meaning Yoda possibly died). However, after Palpatine hands Vader his new weapon, a red lightsaber, Vader stabs Palpatine and declares himself the new emperor. And because Obi-Wan is dead, presumably Padmé would not be able to be taken to Polis Massa, and Luke and Leia would never have been born. And thus, the Jedi are completely dead and Anakin has obtained ultimate power at the cost of everyone who ever cared for him.
  • The Force Unleashed duology's Dark Side endings. In the first game, Starkiller prioritizes his revenge on Vader over saving his allies which results in the budding Rebellion getting crippled before it even leaves the ground and Starkiller being forced to become Vader's replacement. The events of A New Hope go mostly unchanged as the Rebels are still active, Obi-Wan Kenobi still mentors Luke Skywalker (but is killed before they even get off Tatooine), and Luke still destroys the Death Star. It isn't until the Battle of Hoth that things truly diverge, as Starkiller reveals the truth of Luke's heritage to him and takes him on as his Sith apprentice. In the sequel it's even worse as the entire cast of the original trilogy is killed by Starkiller's Diabolus ex Machina clone who gets a Bolivian Army Ending once Palpatine learns of his existence.
  • Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy has a dark side ending which would be a downer, from a certain point of view (though not the PC/Protagonist). Protagonist Jaden Korr is presented with a fellow apprentice who earlier fell to the dark side, but under the thrall of one of the villains. They ask Jaden for help, but in his/her fury, Jaden can opt to fall to the Dark Side. In doing so, they kill their fellow apprentice, as well as the villains underling, and proceed to the final mission, killing enemies and former allies alike. After killing the Big Bad, and claiming the MacGuffin, the protagonist is challenged by their former Master, Kyle Katarn, the previous Protagonist of the series, and bests them in a duel. At the end of the story, Luke Skywalker finds Kyle buried under rocks and helps to free him. Kyle regrets that he has failed as a Master, one student dead and the other lost to the Dark Side, with many of the academy's students dead at their hand. He promises to track them down and stop them. The final shot of this ending shows Jaden at the helm of a Star Destroyer, the MacGuffin in hand, very much under the sway of the Dark Side, and a considerable threat to the Galaxy.
• Of all games, Stephen's Sausage Roll has this, and a hefty dose of Fridge Horror. The "sausages" you've been grilling? They were actually the bloated corpses of the island's inhabitants, who believed that only by being cremated would they reach the true afterlife. And if you thought there'd be a reward for granting their last wishes - nope. You're just left to die and become a "sausage" yourself, condemned to never reach your afterlife because there is no-one left to grill you.
• This can happen in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and the remake Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life if you refuse to get married by the end of the first year and trigger the Non-Standard Game Over. Not only do you have to reject a marriage candidate to their face to do it, whoever proposed to you has a unique sad reaction, complete with downbeat music in the background. And then after seeing the rejected leave, Takakura then says that he guesses farming's not your style and lets you know that if you want another career, it's not here—and tells your late dad above that your heart wasn't in the farm, with the last scene of you walking out the valley to leave forever before a Fade to Black.
• The Streets of Rage 3 route in Streets of Rage Remake ends badly no matter what you do. If you fail to beat Shiva before the bomb goes off, you and him die, along with a fair portion of the city destroyed as well. If you beat him in time, the bomb still goes off and destroys a portion of the city, with our heroes watching the destruction from afar. Disarming the bomb and beating Shiva results in Mr. X escaping to wreak havoc another day.
• In String Tyrant most of the Mary transformed endings are downer endings. Mary loses her free will, hunts down and transforms her friends into monsters like herself. After that she spends an eternity forcibly happy with the situation, hunting and transforming anyone else unlucky enough to be transported to the mansion.
• Suikoden:
  • In most games, the normal ending (that is, the ending you get if you didn't recruit all 108 stars of destiny) tends to be bittersweet. This is not the case for the normal ending to Suikoden II, which is depressing.
  • In Suikoden V, if you have recruited less than 60 stars of destiny, the main character goes over the Despair Event Horizon and wanders off into the frozen mountains alone, utterly broken by his experiences.
• Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special has a very notable ending (courtesy of a developer who got his start with this game, Goichi Suda): following a Trauma Conga Line in which his coach is murdered, he accidentally kills his best friend in the ring, his relationship with his girlfriend collapses, and his tag partner gets murdered by the man responsible for the death of his coach, The Hero defeats the murderer in a title match and becomes world champion. Afterwards, the reality of his situation hits him: for all of his accomplishments and fame, his championship victory is meaningless with no one to share it with. The game then skips forward three days after to a shot of the hero's house. After a few tense seconds, a gunshot rings out...
• The normal mode ending of Super House of Dead Ninjas. Nintai defeats the One Armed Ninja and Abarghus, only for Abarghus' spirit to possess her when she tries to leave the tower. The game ends with Abarghus mockingly asking Nintai if she truly thought she could just leave his tower as mouths and tentacles erupt from her body. Averted in the hard mode ending, where Nintai manages to banish Abarghus for good as well as redeem the One Armed Ninja.
• In the Flash game Super Ryucopter, the heroes save the world from a bunch of monsters, only to die from crashing into the moon.
• The ways to lose in Survivor: Fire involve the family members dying.

• Some of the endings of Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis are quite the downer endings. In one of them, the hero's lover sacrifices herself to kill the Big Bad, the hero's best friend dies thanks in no small part to the hero, and said best friend's father, a duke, sends his army after the hero, forcing him to go into hiding. The game's secret ending (which is also the canonical one) is hardly any better, as all of the above happens and the hero is rewarded by the Pope for killing the Big Bad with a new name, Lans Tartare, which reveals to fans of the series that this game was a prequel, and that the hero is an antagonist in Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together.
• In Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, two of the three endings are Downer Endings:
  • Bad Ending (essentially a Non-Standard Game Over): Emil commits suicide because he terribly wounded Marta.
  • Normal Ending: Emil is sealed away with the world tree, Yggdrasill, for 1000 years.
• Tech Romancer, with its multiple characters and branching storylines, has a couple. One possible path, if you fail to defeat the last enemy in a short enough amount of time, has Junpei (your character) fail to escape the castle and is presumed dead. But the cake has to go to Wise Duck: Arvin reappears at the rusted out remains of the Wise Duck 10 years after the last battle. No one knows why aliens attacked, the rest of the crew is dead, and Arvin pours out a bottle in memory of his team. And that's the happy ending...the sad ending reveals that Arvin was executed for trying to convince the crew not to kill an innocent little girl (and they weren't even going to anyway, they just needed to know they could trust him), and the rest of the story mode was just a Dying Dream. And one of Kei's possible endings where she takes the path of the Messianic Archetype and tries to save humanity from their polluting ways, but decides to leave the Earth so that the humans could fend for themselves.
• Tekken 8: The "Despair" ending of its Story Mode ends with Jin's Redemption Quest culminating in Kazuya killing him and stamping out all remaining resistance, leaving the globe under the control of a genocidal madman willing to destroy countries for not being strong enough.
• Tenchu 2 ends bad regardless of whether or not you clear the final mission as Tatsumaru.
• Terranigma ends with the lead character ceasing to exist because he destroyed the evil entity that was the source of his life. He is 'rewarded' for this by The Powers That Be by being allowed one last day in his pre-heroic life along with his old friends - all of whom will cease to exist along with him - before dying. The credits are superimposed over the last dream of the protagonist as he fades away. It's implied that, as the world cycles back and forth, Ark's spirit is the one with the "duty" to perform this role. Every time.
• Thing-Thing: Thing-Thing 4 ends with Project 154 being trapped in a room by the Corrupt Corporate Executive controlling Systems Corp., which is then pumped full of a gas to remove 154's Healing Factor. No matter how hard they fight, 154 is inevitably gunned by down Systems Corp. mercenaries and their corpse used to refine the genetic splicing process, letting the company get away with their crimes. The associated Thing-Thing Arena series also heavily implies that 154 is resurrected as a slave to the corporation for use in testing, with their free will forcibly removed.
• The Three Stooges video game has a downer ending if the Stooges paid less then $5,000. The evil banker (named I. Fleecum) blurts to the Stooges that they did not raise enough money to save Ma's Orphanage, and the Orphanage is shut down for good and I. Fleecum gives out his last evil laughter. No Ending Credits is shown.
• In the Tiger Road, it's possible to achieve the true ending even if you decide to skip the first three levels, going straight to the fourth one, through the stage select, but only in the US version. In the Japanese Version Tora e no Michi if you enable the level select through DIP Switches and do the same thing, you won't achieve the same result. In fact, after you defeat Ryuken there will be a sequence with japanese text and after this, you will sent back to the first level.
• Tomb Raider:
  • Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation ends with Lara apparently falling to her death. However, she comes Back from the Dead in Angel of Darkness.
  • Tomb Raider: Underworld. Hey Lara, guess what? That lifelong quest of yours? And your father's? Every minute of your life you spent on it was totally wasted, your mom's been a zombie the whole time. Seriously, Legend ended on a fucking triumphal march complete with soaring orchestral accompaniment, compared to this.
• Tooth and Tail ends with the pigs rising up and completely destroying everyone else. Though given how idiotic the animals' reason for going to war was, you might not see this as a necessarily bad ending.
• To the Moon moves between this and Bittersweet Ending. At the end, Johnny gets his wish and goes to the moon and a beautiful sequence plays out just as he dies. But it was all in his head, he never really went to the moon and instead he and River had a difficult marriage and he sometimes deeply resented her. Plus, he never really found out why he wanted to go to the moon a.k.a. that he knew River ever since he was a small child or that he had a twin brother that died in a car accident. And to twist the knife further, it gets heavily implied at the end that Neil is dying himself.
• Touhou Kenbun Roku: Following Marco's death, Bunroku washes up on some island which is some sort of detainment for those who mess with history. Bunroku is forced to go into a Japanese bathtub, where he soon goes insane, leaving him screaming in the style of Edvard Munch's famous "The Scream" painting.
• In the Flash game Trick-or-Treat Adventure, the protagonist goes to great lengths to get his candy… only to die from an undiagnosed case of diabetes.
• "The Telephone Call", the third chapter in the second volume of Twilight Syndrome, ends with the source of the haunting revealed to be a young relative of Yukari's who had passed away from illness without fulfilling her promise to give her a papercrat doll as a gift. The haunting is resolved after Yukari identifies her and gives her a reassuring farewell.
• Undertale:
  • The worst ending takes things one step further and makes it so that future attempts at the best ending will be tainted. You have to sell your soul to the Fallen Child if you go through with a Genocide run, and if you get the True Pacifist ending after that, the Fallen Child makes their move and ruins everything you were working toward. However, you can make things right if you meddle with the game files and prevent synchronization with the Steam Cloud.
  • The worst ending is only achieved after you kill every single monster in every single area, including the major characters of the game. All the people who were friends with you in the pacifist route will now treat you like a freak and some will even try to stop you themselves, but you can almost all of them in one hit. The world will become very empty as everyone is trying to escape from you, there's barely any music, no funny interactions, no minigames, and tons of soulless grinding. When you finally get to the castle, the final boss fight against Sans is intentionally unfair and difficult. Winning doesn't earn you any sense of accomplishment and only means you've just killed the guy who's been there for you since the beginning. What's your reward for all of this? You meet the Fallen Child, who was awakened by your actions and who will now erase the world, whether you want them to or not. Since the world has been destroyed, you can't replay it...not without selling your SOUL to the Fallen, which guarantees you will never earn a happy ending on your own again. Trying to get the best ending after this one manages to make things even worse, because there, with the barrier destroyed, now the Fallen is free to destroy humanity as well. Oh, and the means to get the worst ending means that obtaining it by accident is highly improbable.
  • Even some of the Neutral path endings can result in this depending on who you kill and who you leave alive.
    • Sparing Toriel in any ending besides the Pacifist-Neutral ending results in her attempting to instill a "humans are friends" philosophy, only to have it harshly rejected by the remaining monsters, who soon stage a revolt against her. To avoid further conflict, she steps down willingly^note Provided Undyne isn't left alive. Otherwise, Undyne spearheads the rebellion and ends up throwing her out of the castle (likely literally). and spends the rest of her days exiled to the Ruins. At least she has Sans to keep her company.^note If Papyrus wasn't killed, that is. If he was, his last line before hanging up implies that he'll be joining her.
    • Sparing Undyne and Mettaton results in the former being crowned empress of the Underground, and doing everything in her power to bypass the barrier, wage war on humanity once more, and personally see you dead. Any humans located under her rule are to be killed on sight because of this.
    • Alphys seems to have it the worst in the neutral endings. If you spare Undyne and kill Mettaton, she's heavily implied to have been Driven to Suicide, with Undyne suffering from a Heroic BSoD as a result. Papyrus tries to get her out of her funk by convincing him to go after you, but she rejects the offer, saying that doing so "won't bring anybody back". Sparing Mettaton and killing Undyne results in her still missing, with Mettaton building a statue in her honor. The only ending where she isn't implied to be dead is when you bail on a genocide run at the last second. In that ending, she's crowned as the Underground's new queen and savior with Sans as her advisor. Despite being decent with her new position, she misses her friends and curses herself for not killing you when she had the chance.
    • Speaking of Mettaton, sparing him while killing Undyne and Toriel leads to him being the leader of the Underground and brainwashing the monsters with his TV Show. Papyrus, if you left him alive, mentions that anyone who doesn't worship Mettaton is never seen again, which bodes poorly for the future of the Underground.
    • Killing off all potential rulers as well as some monsters results in the remaining monsters losing all hope of escaping the Underground, instead coming to the conclusion that they'll perish trapped in its darkness. Sans refuses to take the crown because he's reached that same Despair Event Horizon long ago. At the end of this sobering message, he'll either sign off with "See ya" or, if you killed 20+ monsters, wish for you to "go to hell" instead.
    • It's fangame, Undertale Yellow has one as well. Since Clover is Doomed by Canon to be dead by the events of Undertale, in every route except the non-canon Genocide route, you have to watch the poor child die.
• The Unreal series had a habit of using these:
  • Unreal: you're stuck in an escape pod with little hope of rescue.
    • Upgraded to Bittersweet Ending at the Return to Na Pali Expansion Pack. You manage to find another shuttle and escape back to civilization, but since you didn't got eliminated by the marines stationed at that sector^note They rescued you from the faulty escape pod from the above ending, specifically because, as an death-row convict, you're that much expendable. And following the plotline objectives, now you know more than you should., you're on the run from the law. Again.
  • Unreal II: you're stuck in an escape pod with little hope of rescue and your crew is dead.
  • Unreal Championship had your character getting locked in one of the tubes on an arena, and then being shot by errant fire.
  • Unreal Tournament III: Akasha is dead, but so is Reaper's entire squad, except for Reaper himself. The last thing we see is Reaper, surrounded, about to fight his way out or die trying. Cut to black. Even if he succeeds, how the hell is he getting home?
• Depending on the player's choices in Until Dawn, all eight characters can die. Even if certain characters survive and some don't, not all of them will even get a Bittersweet Ending.
  • If Mike shot and killed Emily, he will be mentally broken by the experience and admit to the deed, meaning he will be going to jail.
  • If Jessica survives but everyone else dies, she will be completely traumatized by the events.
  • If Chris and Ashley have a Relationship Upgrade but Chris dies, Ashley will be crying during the interviews as she laments that they never had a chance.
  • If Chris is the Sole Survivor, when the interviewer asks him about Josh, Chris will turn away and his expression will crumble, realizing he failed to save his best friend.
  • Hannah's fate. Knowing her sister was dead, left in the mines for weeks, freezing, starving and alone, waiting for a rescue that wouldn't come. In the end, Hannah was forced to eat Beth's body to survive, unknowingly transforming her into a Wendigo where she would hunt down the rest of her friends and brother.
  • Regardless of the player's choices, Josh will either be killed by his own sister or transform into a Wendigo. Even worse if the character is the only survivor, because no one will know what happened to them.
  • The Washington parents. Not only did they spend a year with absolutely no closure over Beth and Hannah's whereabouts; their daughters's eventual fates are extremely gruesome. They lose their only other child, either due to Hannah crushing Josh's head or to a Fate Worse than Death. Even more poignantly, the family lodge that held many memories and keepsakes is destroyed in an explosion.
  • The fact killing any of the Wendigo releases their spirits, allowing them to continue possessing victims that are trapped in the mountain, driving them to cannibalism in order to transform them into Wendigo. The Wendigo spirit was unleashed due to the sacred mountain being disturbed, but if Sam lives, during her interview she may tells them they need to check the mines, despite everything she's been through.
• Velvet Assassin has an incredibly horrific, Tear Jerker ending. Basically, the final level takes place in a village being burned to the ground and the villagers rounded up (and taken to the church) or killed by the Nazis because the village was hiding a British spy — Violette Summers, the player. In the end, the Nazis take all the villagers to the church, lock them inside, and set the church on fire. Violette is too late in getting there, hears the villagers burn alive, and collapses (although she survives and wanders the countryside in the credits). The leader of the Nazis turns out to be the guy Violette was supposed to kill.
• The Vision Of The Ant: Instead of finding some kind of peace after killing Natas, the Ant succumbs to his madness.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale) is loaded with tearjerker moments:
  • Lee ends up dying as a result of a zombie bite that he got at the end of Episode 4. Amplified due to the fact that this results in little Clementine, whom Lee had dedicated himself to keeping safe throughout the game, trying to survive on her own (at least until the sequel), but dialed to 11 if you opt to prevent Lee turning into a walker...by having Clem shoot him. No shame in reaching for the tissues, boys and girls.
  • The second season ends this way, and it's even worse. Jane, who has long had doubts about Kenny's sanity, concocts a sociopathic plan that involves faking AJ's death, except Kenny's reaction is far worse than she predicted; he completely snaps and tries to kill her. During the very nightmarish fight between them, Kenny has Jane pinned and is trying to stab her in the chest with a huge knife, and Clementine is left with a gun. There are a number of possibilities, and none of them good:
    • Kenny stabs Jane to death and they find AJ alive and well. Kenny attempts to justify killing Jane, and they leave. Later on, they come across a survivor community that will accept Clementine and AJ but not Kenny. Depending on your choice, Clementine leaves with a potentially violent and dangerous man who has a tenuous grasp on his own sanity, or takes up safety but leaves Kenny to fend for himself.
    • Clementine is forced to shoot Kenny dead. Clementine says a tearful goodbye to Kenny and Jane explains her gambit and begs for forgiveness. Clementine and AJ are left with an unfettered survivalist who will endanger a baby's life just to prove a point. They return to the ruins of Carver's settlement and camp out there, and there's a further choice to let a family in or turn them away.
    • Another comes when you either let Kenny kill Jane and turn him away, or save Jane's life and then refuse to forgive her. Either way, Clementine sets off with a newborn baby in her arms, alone as the blizzard worsens. And there is always the choice of letting Kenny kill Jane and then shooting him anyway, resulting in the same ending, but making it feel even bleaker. Regardless, the game ends with a short scene of Clementine and AJ covered in zombie blood walking towards a huge horde of zombies in a valley.
  • A New Frontier has four possible endings, some better than others. When the group finds a bulldozer to use to fix Richmond's walls during a walker invasion, Kate reveals to David that she's been sleeping with Javier, causing David to snap and attack Javi before running off with Gabe. At this point the player can choose to either go after Gabe and David or help Kate fix the wall.
    • If Clementine goes after David and Gabe while Javi goes with Kate, the two of them manage to plug the wall while Clem is only able to save Gabe, who had to Mercy Kill his own father after he started to turn.
    • If Javi and Clem go after Gabe and David and leave Kate to fend for herself, they manage to save the two of them and go back to Richmond only to discover that Kate was turned after fixing the wall. Javi can then choose to Mercy Kill her or leave her in that state.
    • Similar to the above two endings, if Javi goes after David and Gabe alone, then he finds David mortally wounded and Gabe decides to shoot him rather than have Javi do it. The two of them return to Richmond only to discover that Clem was separated from Kate after fixing the wall, and Kate was turned as a result.
    • If nobody goes after Gabe and David, then after plugging the wall they rush to the accident site only to discover that David was eaten by walkers while Gabe is dying from his wounds. After a tearful goodbye with Clem, Gabe asks Javi to give him his gun because he doesn't want to turn. Javi can choose to oblige or do it himself.
• Warcraft III - the demonic Burning Legion are defeated; however, most of the human kingdoms have been destroyed, their population transformed into undead monsters. And the World tree, which helped maintain Night Elves' immortality, was destroyed in the process, although it started to regrow soon afterwards.
  • Also in the expansion pack, where Arthas fuses with Ner'zhul, creating one of the most powerful villains in the franchise. Things haven't gotten a whole lot better in the universe since then either. If how many Sealed Evils In A Can have become unsealed, or close to it since then, is any indication, things have gotten a whole lot worse. Not even World of Warcraft made a single effort to solve this.
  • There's also the novel trilogy War of the Ancients: the demons are repelled, but the Well of Eternity implodes, tearing the continent in half, the dragons are weakened by treachery, and Illidan secretly smuggled some of the water from the Well and makes a new one. Worst of all, the real villains (known as the Old Gods) even manage to gain something from these events, transforming the drowning Highborne into their servants, the Naga.
• Wasteland 3 can potentially end this way depending on player choices.
  • If the Desert Rangers move to Colorado and abandon Arizona instead of sending back supplies as planned, the ending slideshow wastes no time in describing how prosperous Colorado becomes before delivering a Mood Whiplash by describing how your companion Jodie Bell who's been with you since the beginning returns home to try to help her family farm only for it to fail without the promised supplies while her parents are murdered by raiders, causing her to become bitter and resentful towards you.
  • With a Kiss-Ass skill of 10 the player can choose to side with Liberty, who wastes no time in razing the civilization her father built to the ground while he's Forced to Watch and building a despotic hellhole in its place.
• Way of the Samurai 4 has ten possible endings. Sadly, 3 of them are this trope:
  • The first ending many players will face has their player character being boiled alive. You join a tournament set up by the Chief Minister Onsen Kinugawa. When you win the tournament and join the other winners on stage, you are then dropped through a trapdoor, which leads to a huge bowl of boiling water. This ending sadistically gives you a Hope Spot, in the form of your character hanging onto the edge, but is quickly dropped into the pot by the Minister himself, who gloats evilly about it. The narrator then tells how your player character made no impact on history and no one remembers him.
  • Joining the xenophobic Prajna movement can result into two endings. One of them has the entire movement, including your character, being gunned down by the forces of the Chief Minister.
  • If you managed to enter the Hidden story path, but failed to meet all the requirements for the Golden Ending, the game ends with you, and several other characters, attempting to assassinate the Chief Minister. But in the end, he is revealed to be a body double. The real one then executes all characters involved in the assassination plot, including you.
• When They Cry:
  • Both exemplified and ultimately subverted by Higurashi: When They Cry. Most of the individual arcs end with one of the main characters either brutally murdering or being murdered by one (or more) of their best friends, but the cycle of murders ultimately leads to a Good End for the main characters.
  • The same applies to its companion, Umineko: When They Cry. One of the worst endings has the protagonist stripped naked, forced to be a pet/servant to the antagonist, and is eaten alive by people in goat-masks. Oh, and this is after a lot of the other island's inhabitants are murdered.
  • The ending of the series also applies where it at best is bittersweet. Battler finally once again can meet his family and Beatrice in the golden land or a downer where everything from ep 3 and forward was just a way for an amnesiac Battler to sort out his memories about Rokkenjima.
• The indie adventure game the white chamber (sic) has several endings. Four of them result in Sarah dying, but both of them are all too easily avoidable. The other three...Holy fuck. You learn that Sarah, the person you've been playing as, murdered the entire crew just for the sake of getting the artefact's power, and she's been forced into a loop in order to redeem her sins. And that's part of both endings. The bad ending results in Sarah failing to redeem herself and being forced into the loop again, the worse ending ends with her being tormented by zombies, and the good ending? Not that much better. She redeems herself, the station explodes, but she's isolated on an island on the nearest planet. And the artefact is still around. Sure, you get Fanservice, but the music doesn't help either.
• In Wick, you've been Dead All Along this whole time.
• The bad ending to Winback is considered a Downer Ending, While fighting through the terrorists Jean-Luc is held back long enough from preventing the terrorists from using the GULF satellite to destroy the Pentagon and the White House, and he later finds Jake and Lisa (Who normally survives in the good and normal endings) dead and swears revenge on the terrorists. Later, he confronts Cecile in the control room, who tells him that he wasted his time, as the satellite had broken up in orbit after it's third blast and destroying the Pentagon, meaning he could have prevented this, and the deaths of at least 1 of his other team mates if only he had been faster. After defeating Cecile, Jean-Luc confronts Kenneth, and after a short conversation with him. Kenneth commits suicide to prevent capture. Only Jean-Luc and Keith survive the mission and some of the terrorists (Some of whome you fight as bosses.) remain at large/. Oh, and Dan, the SCAT team leader, remains missing.
• The Witcher 3 and its expansions offer several endings depending on Geralt's choices, many of them depressing.
  • If Geralt has been a less-than-ideal father figure to Ciri, the game can end with Ciri dying while saving the world from The White Frost, and Geralt mourning after retrieving her Witcher medallion from Weavess while a swarm of monsters rush into the house he's in.
  • In the Hearts of Stone expansion, unless Geralt decides to take action the story ends with Gaunter O'Dimm taking Olgierd von Everec's soul and rewarding Geralt for helping him do it.
  • The Blood & Wine expansion has three endings, two of them bad. If Geralt allows Detlaff to kill Syanna, then regardless of whether he kills Detlaff or not Geralt will be thrown in prison and narrowly escape life imprisonment thanks to the efforts of Regis and Dandelion. The Duchess now hates Geralt even if he reveals Syanna's plan to murder her, refuses to pay him the full reward he was owed for stopping the murders, and if he let Detlaff go then many in Toussaint resent him as well. If Geralt doesn't figure out why Syanna wanted the Duchess dead and convince them to reconcile, then Syanna stabs the Duchess in the back at her trial before being immediately shot in the neck with a crossbow bolt. The two sisters are placed side by side in the same crypt, and Geralt goes to place roses on the Duchess' coffin while lamenting the deaths he failed to prevent.
• The Witch's House: As it would turn out, Viola and the Witch actually switched bodies. At the end, Viola's father comes along and, unknowing of this, shoots Viola in the Witch's body, killing her.
• Xenosaga Episode 3. All the connections between worlds have been severed, KOS-MOS drifts alone and broken, four other major characters are killed or disappear (not counting all the villains, many of whom are Anti Villains), and humanity still hasn't found Lost Jerusalem. Definitely setting up for a fourth offering, but said offering hasn't happened yet.
• XIII, the cel-shaded first person shooter based on the first half of the comic series of the same, ends with a Cliffhanger after The Reveal of the conspirator, with the protagonist in an impending doom situation. Due to poor sales, the developers declined to adapt the rest of the story in game format.
• You Only Live Once: As noted by the title, this is a Single-Attempt Game, with no way to restart if you lose, and the sequel seeing whatever killed you get executed. You’d figure there’d be a happy ending if you do complete the game… But instead police appear out of nowhere and arrest you for killing the boss, and you get executed.
• The original version of Yume Nikki ends with the main character committing suicide. Its remake, Dream Diary, reveals it as one of her dreams.
• SNK had a habit of doing this in their early, pre-Neo Geo arcade games, making the whole games moot.
  • Prehistoric Isle: after defeating the game’s final boss, which is a Tyrannosaurus rex, and escaping from the mysterious island via volcano, the planes reach a larger cargo plane, only to be swarmed and destroyed by a flock of the most basic pterosaur mooks. Thus ensuring that the location of the uncharted island and its dangers remain secret.
  • Beast Busters: the final boss was just the vanguard of an alien invasion, and the player characters look in terror as a gigantic spaceship descends. May count as Bolivian Army Ending too.
  • SAR: Search And Rescue: in this Alien-inspired game, two space marines investigate a distress signal from a spaceship, finding it invaded by alien parasites. In the end the spaceship gets destroyed (but at least the space marines are safe) and their investigation goes up in smoke. It's also implied that their bosses kept it a secret as to not cause chaos.
  • Cyber-Lip: You are led to believe that A.I. Is a Crapshoot and that the Cyber-Lip control system for Earth's androids is rebelling against humanity. When you confront Cyber-Lip in the final battle, however, it states that its AI is not a crapshoot: it has been sabotaged by evil forces. After Cyber-Lip is destroyed, the President congratulates you for completing your mission, before revealing he is an alien imposter who declares victory now that nothing can stop them from taking over Earth.

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