Failure Is The Only Option / Video Games

• Academagia: Many adventures and events within the game will fall into this. Especially when all the options are either red, or, (gulp) purple.
• Alone in the Dark (2008): Take your pick of allowing Sarah to be possessed by Lucifer, or killing her and having Carnby become the embodiment of Lucifer himself and unleashing the forces of Hell on the world.
• Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning has you solving simple addition and subtraction problems from time to time. From the second notebook onwards, though, the final problem will be a scramble of indecipherable Black Speech (a bit like math in real life, really). There is no right answer to these problems, so you're forced to get them wrong and make Baldi angry at you (speeding him up if he's already chasing you).
  Baldi: Problem three! *BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ* plus *BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ* times *BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ* equals...
• Bioshock 1: At the start of Fort Frolic, Sander Cohen has chained one of his proteges to a piano and is forcing him to play a song he's composed. If the protege misses too many notes, the dynamite strapped to the piano will detonate. Real-life pianists have analyzed the song and declared it nearly impossible to play correctly, even when you aren't fearing for your life. Needless to say, he doesn't last long.
• At the beginning of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, it's possible for Kain to wipe out all of his would-be assassins, even without a GameShark, if proper caution is taken. However, all the exits out of town are blocked off, and you'll just have to walk in and out of a building to respawn the enemies and let Kain die like he's supposed to.
• DEFCON. Goal: Win a nuclear war. You may have spotted the problem already. Hell, even the tagline: "Everybody loses...but maybe you can lose the least!" (Paraphrased, anyway...). The website is even named www.everybodydies.com.
  • One of the best examples of this comes from a metagame strategy known as the "Star of India", a formation that you play with as Asia when fighting 1v1 against Russia. You're aiming to get 99% kills on Russia, but to do so you're completely sacrificing 90% of your population (i.e. all of eastern Asia and Japan) to do so.
  • If it has a win condition, you can win it. Definitely qualifies as a Pyrrhic Victory in most instances, but failure is most definitely not the only option.
• Deus Ex features the fairly unique (for an FPS) feature that your actions in-game modify the storyline and how characters interact with you. However, you are still limited to the same basic story-for example, no matter how badly you want to play the part of cold-blooded assassin working for the hideously corrupt UNATCO, you are forced by your brother to go to a captured NSF base and send a distress signal. This action immediately causes you to be considered a rogue by UNATCO and all the agents will become hostile. It's required to advance the storyline and cannot be avoided.
  • This isn't how the game was supposed to be, actually, as we can see here.
  • At that point, the game was supposed to split into two branching storylines, one following the NSF and another for UNATCO. Of course, we only have the NSF storyline, which as many players remember, is mostly a paragon run through a big conspiracy involving your allegedly-lawful organization UNATCO, and discovering how it was actually controlling the Gray Death spread and selecting which civilians and VIPs were important enough to stay alive and vaccinated with Ambrosia. All under the designs of the Majestic 12. Supposedly, in the canceled UNATCO storyline, YOU would be the one making all that "evil magic" happening, alongside all your old UNATCO allies and chiefs, as you were supposed to, being a nano-aug agent sponsored by the very MJ 12 from the shadows since childhood and all. Ironic, isn't it?
• The entire Diablo series has the goal of destroying the Lord of Terror. Though you end up taking him down in every major game, circumstances always conspire to bring him back, usually bigger and badder than ever.
  • In Diablo II the unnamed protagonist is met with failure at every turn due to arriving ever so slightly too late to have stopped the villain from doing what they were trying to do.
    • Act 1: The hero arrives too late to catch Diablo in his new body and Andariel is successful in delaying his venture to the east to go after Diablo.
    • Act 2: The hero arrives in what couldn't have been more than a few minutes after Diablo got there and freed his brother, which is precisely what you were trying to stop him from doing. They leave Duriel there to delay the character's pursuit.
    • Act 3: You make it to Mephisto mere moments after he activates the power of the soulstones on his brother Diablo and opens a portal to hell for them to escape to, staying behind himself to delay the player's pursuit.
    • Act 4: You actually make it to Diablo and kill him before he does anything too terrible, but that's only because he wasn't actually trying to do anything to Sanctuary at that point, and Baal was still at large in Sanctuary (although fortunately, he didn't manage to find Marius or retrieve his Soulstone until some time after Diablo's defeat, so you don't exactly fail). However, while you do manage to catch up to what the Prime Evils are planning, you squander that lead in the months leading up to...
    • Act 5: Halfway through, you arrive just too late to interrupt Baal from getting an object that will allow him to walk right through the front door of the Worldstone Keep. You then get to Baal and - surprise, surprise - he doesn't seem to have corrupted the Worldstone yet. You fight him and defeat him thinking that you arrived just in time to stop the world from being destroyed, but wait! Tyrael then tells you that the mere act of Baal touching the Worldstone corrupted it completely, meaning that after the fight you find out that yet again you arrived too late, once again by mere minutes at the very most.
    • The entire quest you set out on in the beginning of the game turns into failure after failure. Sure, you destroy 5 of the most powerful evil beings in existence, but not before they succeed in doing the very thing that they set out to do in the first place. And let's not forget Diablo is using the body of the Warrior from the first game.
    • It's notable that in Diablo III, Mount Arreat is now known as Arreat Crater. That's right, Tyreal had to destroy an entire mountain in order to stop the corruption of the Worldstone. Clearly a Pyrrhic Victory, and a temporary one at best.
• Dicey Dungeons: After a run, Lady Luck allows a spin on the prize wheel, which has over a dozen winning spots and a single losing spot. The losing spot is landed on every single time, leading to another run through the dungeons.
• The Dink Network had a mod-building contest once where the submitted mods had to end with Dink failing whatever the main goal was supposed to be. One or two of the better ones, such as The Basilisk Smile, even had multiple ways to fail.
• Multiple fights in the story of Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories are Hopeless Boss Fights unless you've gotten levels you wouldn't realistically have on a first play-through. Some of these fights, while winnable if you power-level or in New Game Plus, cause a Non-Standard Game Over for your trouble.
  • Disgaea Infinite will cause all but one of the outcomes to end in failure. Once you find out that Thursday's upgrade caused its part to fall off of it when it went berserk, causing Laharl to think it is the Super Rare Pudding he was looking for, your first action may be to get Gordon and Thursday out of Laharl's room. Thursday gets upgraded in a different room and Laharl gets the part from a Prinny. Try to keep Laharl away, by say, going with Flonne to find the delivery boy she is looking for, and he gets bored and leaves, finding the fake pudding. If you try to flat out make Etna give Laharl the pudding she has, it still blows up in Laharl's face anyway (although there is a reason for that: after her meeting with Laharl, Etna goes to a secret room in the castle to find her pudding is also a fake). In subsequent loops, the protagonist flat out asks his MacGuffin if he can't mind control Laharl to prevent him from eating the fake pudding.
• Dragon Age II: No matter what choices Hawke makes or how hard they try, the situation in Kirkwall continues to get worse and worse. Varric heavily implies in his narration that the Mage-Templar Civil War that begins at the end of the game was completely inevitable. If it hadn't started there, it would have started elsewhere. The events of the game were just the final fuels to the fire that had been building for centuries.
• Dragon Quest VIII: The Big Bad Rhapthorne needs to kill the descendants of the seven sages that sealed him away to be free. The party arrives in time to save three of the seven, fighting a Boss Battle that they have to win each time, only to fail anyway thanks to Cut Scene Incompetence. At the end, they eventually just decide to kill Rhapthorne outright, which works.
• Dragon Quest XI: At the end of Act One, Jasper ambushes the party at the heart of Yggdrasil leading to an unwinnable fight where you cannot even do any damage.
• In the Cavia game Drakengard the protagonists endeavor to prevent the seals that hold the world together from being broken, however they always seem to show up just a few minutes too late. Then there's the endings...
• Played for Laughs in Dreamfall Chapters. If Zoë is working for Mira, then she will be tasked with taking a salvaged robot called "Shitbot" out for a walk and test its functions. Sure enough, Shitbot fails every single test in rather comedic ways.
• Dwarf Fortress literally has no win condition. Just an astonishing number of lose conditions. There is a reason the official motto is "Losing is Fun!"
  • There is only one actual lose condition: everybody dies. And many, many ways to get there.
• In The Elder Scrolls, the Akaviri race known as the Kamal has this going on for their entire race. According to in-game sources, they are a race of "snow demons" who freeze every winter and then thaw out in the spring to attack the Tang Mo "monkey folk". Every year, the Tang Mo successfully defend themselves. The one time the Kamal broke this Vicious Cycle was to attack Tamriel (the continent where every game in the series to date has taken place), and that invasion failed as well.
  • In Skyrim, Jarl Ulfric's public challenge to High King Torygg trapped him. He could accept and die in a lopsided duel against a war veteran who everybody else knew was ten times the warrior, or refuse and be humiliated and possibly trigger a Moot which would see Ulfric become High King anyway. There was no good choice the poor boy could have made.
  • The consequences of the hero's victory in the various instalments of the series seem to take this to Cosmic Horror Story levels. The Nerevarine saves Morrowind from falling to House Dagoth, and even reality itself being overwritten by Dagoth Ur's twisted mind. But destroying the Heart of Lorkan weakened the barrier between Mundus and Oblivion, which would become the crisis point for the next instalment. Further, the fall of the Tribunal Temple also cost Vivec his divinity and existence, ultimately resulting in the meteor whose descent he arrested wiping out the city named after him, and the eruption of Red Mountain, which made much of Morrowind uninhabitable. The Hero of Kvatch would be instrumental in defeating the daedric invasion of Mehrunes Dagon, but in the end, Dagon's purpose was fulfilled; the Septim dynasty was wiped out and the Amulet of Kings destroyed. As the Prince of Revolution, he definately brought the chance he represents as the empire weakened, allowing an extremist faction to rise in Summerset whose ultimate goal is the unmaking of the world and utter genocide. Though the Dragonborn has the choice of who ought to rule Skyrim, his true purpose is to defeat Alduin, the world eater. But Alduin had strayed from his purpose because of his arrogance, instead maintaining his reign over mortals rather than ending the world and all that lived on it. His death would create a void that is free to be filled by a new creation of Akatosh with the purpose to end the cycle.
    • Not even the non-player inhabitants of Mundus can seemingly refrain from contributing to their world's destruction. Various so-called Towers exist all over the world, both made by gods and mortals. These load-bearing structures maintain the stability of the planet and prevent it merging into Oblivion. But through events, many of these Towers have been rendered inactive or destroyed, including the folly of mortals. The Thalmor gained stewardship of the Crystal Tower during the Oblivion Crisis and they failed to protect it from complete destruction. Tiber Septim made the Brass Tower his weapon of war, and it was wiped from existence twice. The White-Gold Tower became the palace of the Empire, who temporarily lost control during the Great War with the Aldmeri Dominion, who burned it. Even if it remains active, it is in great danger as long as the Empire remains threatened. The Orichalc Tower sank into the sea along with Yokuda when a careless Yokudan swordsinger performed his craft. The Coral Tower, if it is a real one, is believed to have been the base of operations for the vile Sloads. This race unleashed a devastating plague upon the world, prompting them nations around them to attack and destroy the surface realm of the Sloads, who sank their land and the tower in an effort to survive underwater. And the Red Tower, housing the Heart of Lorkan, was rendered inactive by the Nerevarine's actions, who both destroyed the Heart of Lorkan and ended Vivec, who had kept a meteor suspended over his city, whose impact devastated Morrowind in the Red Mountain's eruption. It seems even when done to end a more immediate, more serious threat, the Towers and the world they protect are unraveling...
• Fallout 3 - the quest Tenpenny tower is about getting a load of intelligent ghouls into Tenpenny tower and gives you two main options, let in a load of feral ghouls and get all the human residents killed or the peaceful solution, where you convince the management let the intelligent ghouls move in. Unfortunately many of the human residents get killed which ever you pick as there is a 'disagreement' shortly after you leave. Unless you Take a Third Option and kill the Ghoul leader just after you arrange the peace. You'll get some evil points, you'll 'fail' the quest and the other ghouls will turn hostile, but you can escape without killing the normal ghouls and the massacre will be averted. How killing the murdering, psychopathic ghoul leader is a bad act will forever remain unknown. You can also assassinate the leader undetected, which will also stop the massacre and not award any bad karma.
• All the possible endings for Far Cry 5 has this. No matter what ending you get, Joseph Seed wins in the end. If you choose to fight and stop him, his prophecy of doom comes true with a nuke going off shorty after defeating and arresting him, which results in the Silent Protagonist being stuck with him in one of the many bunkers for the remainder of their life. If you accept his final offer to walk away and leave his cult alone, despite all the damage you've caused during the game, then everyone leaves, but it's implied that Joseph's older brother's brainwashing ultimately worked, when the song "Only You" plays on the radio before the credits. And there is the secret ending, where you don't try to arrest Joseph Seed in the beginning of the game, and which triggers a cutscene of you leaving area, ending the game. Ultimately rectified in the sequel. Not only are that game's villains actually defeated by the end, but the player even gets to stop Joseph's successor and then finally either kill Joseph or let him live with the overwhelming grief and knowledge that his actions were not what God wanted.
• While it is possible to get happier endings in the first two Fatal Frame games, the endings where you fail to save your brother/sister are the canon endings.
• FEAR. Goal: To stop Alma's shenanigans. Two games in, and she's only made things much worse. As an icing on the cake, the people who could do something about it manage to be even worse than Alma (I am looking at you Genevieve Aristide).
• In most Final Fantasy games, no matter how hard the heroes try, the villain can never be prevented from becoming all-powerful. Their victory only comes after the villain has already brought the world to its knees.
  • Particularly, the plot of Dissidia Final Fantasy has an infinite number of possible worlds in which the characters are always fighting each other. When one side wins, things just start over.
  • Final Fantasy II also deserves special mention, because even when the heroes actually succeed in killing the BBEG, he just takes over Hell and comes back stronger. The heroes then kick his superpowered ass anyway.
  • In-universe in Final Fantasy X: summoners don't come back from their pilgrimages alive... and they aren't supposed to. Yuna does manage it, in the end, but not because she wasn't prepared to die — she just wasn't prepared to let someone else become Sin and start the cycle over again.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2: as revealed in the secret ending, all possible timelines lead to Caius winning. Realizing this sent Lightning over the Despair Event Horizon and she voluntarily crystallized herself.
• If the seventh night is to be taken as canon, Mike Schmidt, the protagonist of Five Nights at Freddy's doesn't make it past his first week on the job, being fired for "tampering with the animatronics" (i.e. customizing their levels of activity). Either way, the "reward" for completing the custom night is to be fired without pay. Fritz Smith, the protagonist of the custom night in the sequel, only lasts that one night for the same reason.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: Niko Bellic. The end game gives you two choices for endings: Choice one is to work with the main bad guy, in which case the game punishes you for compromising on your values, and Niko's cousin Roman is killed as a direct result. Choice two involves getting your revenge and killing the main bad guy, in which case Niko is punished for choosing revenge, when the one woman Niko might love, and his one chance at salvation (Kate Mcreary) is killed instead. While Niko gets revenge on the murderer either way, it's implied that he will NEVER find peace.
• Halo: Reach. You are Doomed by Canon. There are some survivors, but you will not succeed in defending Reach though you'll pass the torch to Master Chief for him to save humanity in your place.
• Hitman 2 plays with this trope in its Miami mission for Sierra Knox. The game never lets Sierra win the Global Innovation Race by herself, and the only way to do so is for 47 to interfere with her gameplay loop in some way (killing Moses Lee, her direct competitor, or disqualifying Moses Lee).
• Inazuma Eleven: A few matches are impossible to win, normally those at the start of the game. One particularly note worthy example comes in the third game though, where one of the matches three quarters of the way through the game requires you to lose as part of the story. The first official match you take part in also requires you to fail at first, and have the opponent team score several goals. Your states are so low, with no way to raise them before the match, that you've not no choice but to fail every single thing you try to (you can actually get a few successes, if you're really lucky, but scoring a goal is complete impossible). Of course considering there's no real warning of this, you may very well not realize this and assume you're just playing really poorly.
• Present in the ending to Kane & Lynch, where the two possible endings to the game involve Kane abandoning his allies to save Jenny, proving in her eyes that he's every bad thing she thought he was, or Kane going back to save his allies and getting Jenny killed. The sequel hints that either Lynch isn't too upset about the first ending, or that Jenny survived the second. It's not really clear which happened.
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance: During the side quest "Playing with the Devil" in Uzhitz, Henry is asked by the priest to investigate the local herbalist, who is rumored to be inciting several local women to commit witchcraft. The truth is, it was actually the women who asked the herbalist to make them a magic ointment to let them speak with their dead relatives, a request she reluctantly fulfilled by making one with incredibly strong hallucinogenic results. When Henry confronts the alleged "witches" at their gathering, he ends up getting dosed on the psychedelic ointment and having vivid and nightmarish visions, including seeing the women turned into animals. Towards the end, the group are attacked by "devils" and Henry can either kill the "devils", kill the women, or flee and allow the demons to kill the women. When he awakens from his drug trip, he discovers the "devils" were actually a pair of bandits trying to rob them. In any case, his hands are soaked in the blood of another and a Reputation loss is incurred from both the priest and the herbalist no matter what. The only way to "win" this quest is not to complete it in the first place.
• Mega Man X spends half of his time destroying Mavericks, and the other half trying to put a stop to the war. A hundred years later, war is still in full swing. In fact, the war only ended at the end of the Zero series, long after his "death". There's a reason why fans think of him as The Woobie...
• The first act of Modern Warfare. After your failed attempt to capture Al-Asad, the city where most of your missions took place gets nuked and You Are Too Late to escape it. And Price's attempt to snipe Zakhaev will inevitably be non-fatal. Attempting to capture Zakhaev's son for information will always end with him committing suicide when cornered.
• Modern Warfare 2 also pulls this multiple times. In "No Russian", your character will be shot at the end - and the Russians will blame the attack on the United States based on an American being amongst the terrorists. Attempting to rescue "Icepick" will fail as he will have died before you reach him. Finally, infiltrating Makarov's safehouse and copying all the information on his computer will result in your entire team getting wiped out except for you and Ghost - who are promptly shot, covered with petrol, and set on fire by General Shepard, who was apparently supposed to extract you.
• Modern Warfare 3: The level "Turbulence", set on the Russian President's airplane, does this twice. First, your character tries to escort President to an escape pod, only for "Mission Failed" to cross the screen as the plane crashes. You both survive, and you then have to find the President and get him to safety leading to you opening a helicopter door and being promptly shot and killed by Makarov. Later, there is a flashback to the No Russian mission, where you are a dissenting member of Makarov trying to stop the airport massacre. Unfortunately, you are too wounded to catch up to them, and your aim is set up to be off if you try to shoot them from afar.
• Mystic Warriors is an arcade game that supports up to four players, and has five different player characters to pick from. Once all the players pick who to play as, one of the remaining characters gets kidnapped and must be rescued. They are rescued about halfway through, but shortly afterwards they sacrifice themselves to help the others escape a trap, meaning there is no way to save them. The rest of the game is spent avenging their death, and beating the game sees the player characters mourning the death of their fallen comrade.
• The first two Game Gear Nazo Puyo games do not explicitly tell the player that they've failed a mission; after the player has used all of their alotted Puyo, the games will endlessly provide pairs that are completely irrelevant to the current puzzle. This changes in Arle no Roux, where the player is given a hard limit on the number of pairs that they will receive for a given puzzle.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe: There are many warlord states in the former USSR guided by many ideologies, from communism to pluralist liberalism to monarchism. The Black League of Omsk is guided by nothing but hate, hate for the Germans who subjugated Russia and inflicted twenty years of brutality and humiliation upon her people. Omsk's endgoal is the Great Trial, a final war with the Third Reich to erase the very concept of Germany from the face of the Earth and avenge Russia's defeat in World War II. This involves developing nuclear and chemical weapons to match Germany's own stockpile, and the War Hawks of Omsk are so hellbent on genocide against the Germans that not even the looming spectre of global nuclear holocaust is enough to deter them. If you follow through with their plans, this Non-Standard Game Over is inevitable.
• No One Lives Forever's Cate Archer suffers some failures early on no matter what the player does, including the assassination of a man the player spent a whole level protecting and the death of her mentor, or so she thinks. It turns out her missions are being sabotaged from within.
• Activision's Oink! for the Atari 2600 is a reversed Breaking Out game based on The Three Little Pigs, where your goal is to see how long you can keep the Big Bad Wolf from eventually breaking through the wall and coming after your pigs.
• No matter what you do in One Chance, there is no way to find the cure to save everyone on the planet, including your co-workers and wife. You can still save yourself and your daughter in a few endings, though.
• In Patapon, there is a mission called Despair, and in this mission there is a trick: at first you encounter some Zigoton towers with Yumitons, these towers take a lot of time to take down, if that wasn't enough, this mission always has wind against you, favouring the Yumitons and weakening your Yumipons. By the time you are done with the two towers, your troops will already be weakened, and then, you encounter a huge Zigoton gate full of traps that simply stop your Patapons from getting close to it; shall they do it, they will simply perish as the gate's mechanisms are too strong for them. You are supposed to lose this mission in order to continue the game, since here, the Patapon army canonically loses to the Zigotons for the fist time... normally (It is recommendable to bring the Tailwind Juju if found to aid your Yumipons and weaken the Yumitons, and easen the mission a fair bit).
  • After you lose, a cutscene with Meden and a Scout Yaripon will take place, where the Scout tells Meden and the Almighty Patapon about a Zigoton catapult that Patapons can steal and take up to the Zigoton gate to destroy it. Although... you can actually take down the tower without the catapult in the fist try, you just have to be either very powerful or play the most strategic way possible, but that is unlikely for the moment you reach there unless you grind a lot for it; if you manage to take the gate down without the help of the catapult, you will receive the items you skipped from the other missions when stealing the catapult, and also Meden will point out your Mighty strength to take down the gate without the catapult.
• Penumbra: Black Plague features a scene where you accidentally kill someone while hallucinating that they are a monster trying to kill you. You have to go through with it, refusing to do so gets you a Game Over.
• Pony Island: Most of the game's various options, regardless of the version Satan created, simply do not work. Even the text-based adventure has errors.
• The only way to figure out how to get the true ending in POPGOES is by being killed by each animatronic.
• Punch-Out!! Wii has certain challenges that are this. One thing you will need to do for 100% Completion is actually knock down Glass Joe twice, and then throw the fight and let him win by decision. Feels bad, man.
• Resistance 2: All your efforts against the Chimera are in vain. Then they succeed at turning you into one of them.
• In both Rival Schools games, the Story Mode has one of the final bosses as mid-bosses (Raizo Imawano in RS: United by Fate and Kurow Kirishima in Project Justice) with a lot of energy and power, leaving the player with Death Is the Only Option. The characters have to suffer the consequences of being defeated, which are already part of the main story (mostly one of your team been kidnapped by the bad guys).
• In Save the Date, virtually every option you choose leads to Felicia dying and the game restarting. The way you progress in the game is through a system of saving and reloading, and using acquired knowledge to prolong your playthrough.
• Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf: On level 4, you get a magic flute. This flute allows you to hypnotize Sam the Sheepdog, lure him under a falling rock, and steal a sheep before he can react. On level 5, you also get a magic flute. However, when you try to use it on Sam again, you discover that Sam learned from the previous incident and got himself some earplugs. Cue you getting punched all the way back to the starting location. After that, Sam sets up some mines, and starts walking around as opposed to standing in a fixed spot. Even if you already know about this, you still have to do it to be able to advance through the level.
• In Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, you come across dialogue challenges where you need to pick the right answer to get the desired result. However several times you won't have any successful ones: you need to flush out all the failure options so that they get replaced with the one that ''will' work.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Doctor Eggman never succeeds at any of his plans in the long run, either due to Sonic getting in the way, or because whatever force he's using spirals out of his control, and whatever little victories he does earn now and then are short term at best. In Sonic Rivals, Eggman Nega, depicted as his future descendant, reveals that Eggman will never succeed, and his failures completely ruin the Robotnik family name.
  • Terminal Velocity Act 2 from Sonic Colors has Sonic trying to outrun a black hole created by the Final Boss. He does manage to last an impressive 30 seconds, though.
• The Stanley Parable's designer, Cakebread, described the game as such: "You will make a choice that does not matter. You will follow a story that has no end. You will play a game you cannot win." This is reflected in several ways in the game proper:
  • As every "choice" you can make is pre-programmed, The Stanley Parable, and video games in general, can (at best) be regarded as an exploration of the alternatives the programmers were willing to grant you and, at worst, a waste of your time as you're still choosing to sit in front of a computer, pretending that you're making choices in a video game, instead of actually making ones that matter in real life. The game brings attention to this all in numerous ways.
  • The story has endings — lots of them, in fact — but as every route ends with the game loading in a new start, ("The End is Never The End is Never The End",) most routes are affected by earlier attempts at getting through the game, and several routes even have fakeout beginnings, the concept of the game having an "end" is diluted to the point where it ceases to matter.
  • Finally, there's no way to win. Every route either ends in Stanley's death, a darkly ironic turn of events, a jab of Existential Horror aimed directly at the fourth wall, or a combination of all three. There is no sense of sincere triumph, no non-ironic Golden Ending, no meaningful progress and, even though (or maybe even because) the basic premise of the game is whether you follow the instructions of The Narrator or not, there's ultimately no way to actually go Off the Rails.
• StarCraft II has an apocalyptic mission in which you will eventually be overrun no matter what you do. In order to "win" the mission and advance the plot, you must kill a sufficient amount of enemies before this happens.
• Super Mario Bros. featured Mario storming castles and fighting hordes of monsters, alone and with very little firepower, to save Princess Toadstool, only to keep finding out that he's stormed the wrong castle. He gets there in the 8th and final castle.
• In Spider-Man (PS4), there's a mission where the player briefly controls pre-Spider-Man Miles Morales, who must sneak past a bunch of gun toting henchmen. If he's spotted, it's an instant failure, and the player has to try again from the start. Upon successfully completing the mission, a cutscene plays... but it shows Miles immediately being spotted and apprehended by the same gun toting henchmen whom the player just spent the last several minutes sneaking past.
• In Terra Invicta, only one faction's philosophy is objectively doomed to fail even if they come out on top. It is the Protectorate, who believe there is no way for mankind to defeat a star-faring species and so must appease the aliens, reaching a dignified surrender without losing Earth's independence. As they slip further into authoritarianism and denial through their story, their end-goal becomes placing orbital bombardment stations over Earth and restricting any space expansion (because it might provoke the aliens), effectively placing humanity in a straight-jacket, and agreeing to offer ten million soldiers to serve as Battle Thralls. They offer nothing a truly superior attacker could not simply take by force, and do the Hydras' hard work of subjugating humanity for them. Their only "consolation" is they still get to be the ones in charge of Earth, as long as the Hydras are content to let them be - but even their leaders admit this allowance is more tenuous than they would like to publicly admit. Even the Servants, the Cultists who worship the aliens and want them to win and take over Earth, ironically secure quite favorable terms for joining the Hydras' empire by being willing to actually talk to their masters and sticking to their ideals about how Earth's bending the knee is supposed to go.
• In the downloadable game Which, the door to freedom opens only for one. There are just you and a woman-like being with a knife. A Pyrrhic Victory is possible; you can't save both of you, but if you give her a heart instead of a head she'll choose to kill herself so you can escape.
• The Wolf Among Us has a subplot where Mr. Toad can't afford glamour for himself or his son (despite being able to buy a new sports car). Bigby can outright tell him not to go to the Farm and give him some money to pay for a glamour. Despite that, he is still sent to the Farm in the end - while Doomed by Canon overall.
• The main goal of World of Warcraft is presumably to end the war between the Alliance and Horde. Whether one side wins or the two sides come to a peaceful conclusion and finally decide to stop killing each other is up to the individual person. However neither option seems all that obtainable. Any progress either side makes toward the former is washed away by Status Quo Is God, and the two sides will never reach peace as long as a good number of the faction leaders despise each other enough to want to kill each other more than anything else. Essentially the war has to continue or there won't really be a game anymore. However the massive amount of Enemy Mine toward common enemies makes it look a little weird that the two sides would continue to kill each other despite how counterproductive it is, so the Conflict Ball and Idiot Ball are juggled around quite a bit to keep things going. There's a reason the name of the game has the word "war" in it.
• Yanderella has the protagonist trying to navigate a Love Triangle with his two Yandere best friends from childhood, with tragic but predictable results. When you choose a girl to commit to, the other girl snaps and murders both you and your chosen girlfriend in cold blood. The only way to avoid this is to openly avoid committing to either girl and keep things the way they always have been, meaning that the protagonist will likely never get to have any sort of life of his own, instead devoting his time to making sure his two friends don't murder anyone.
• Inverted with You Have to Burn the Rope. Though the Grinning Colossus shoots projectiles which knock you back, there is no way to actually die.
• In ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman, your first attempt at defeating the last boss is met with failure. Hence you go and train in the game's dungeons to gain the power needed to contend with the boss again, only for you to get beaten again and require more training. It goes on like this for a good long while.