Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
...from this cold, dark world.
For a game that's about a Killer Robot invading Hell for blood, ULTRAKILL has a lot of heart-wrenching moments to make the player stop from their carnage for a while and think about the consequences of their actions.
- The fact that Mankind is Dead. Think for a moment of what this means. All the achievements humanity made, all the progress we made, all the kind and good people alive, all just went gone, gone by the very tools they made. Minos implies that the Machines were the causants of mankind's extinction, or just the fact that they were made for the Final War. Nonetheless, it is one of the saddest things this game has to offer.
- It's made worse by the lore findings on Layer 7. The Final War stretched for centuries, and humanity only barely hung on at the very brink, unable to do anything about the nightmare they made of their world until the sheer destruction shut down the Earthmovers, letting them have one more chance. And they finally took that chance, starting an era of peace that could finally endure, perhaps unprecedented for humanity as a whole... and then they all died anyways by their own creations from the same war, with the implication that Hell itself did it out of petty fury because humanity survived the apocalypse they brought to themselves rather than perish like it thought they should have.
- To add more salt to all of this, when the humans died, a majority of them went to Hell for their bad deeds when they were still alive. Not only do they all had to go through a living Hell when they were still on Earth, now they have to suffer for eternity. While going to Hell means that those souls did something bad in life, Lucifer himself questioned God if eternal punishment was too much for them, a question that made the once brightest angel being thrown by The Father out of Heaven and into Hell. It is even worse when you remember that King Minos turned the Lust Layer into a paradise because he though that people who loved one another shouldn’t be a crime worthy of eternal punishment, implying that the majority of the souls in Hell are actually just flawed or outright good people that ended up suffering because of the high standards that Heaven made. When the Machines invade Hell for blood and stay active as long as they can by killing all the Husks and Demons for the precious red fuel, the souls of the sinners can finally rest in peace.
- While they're all bloodthirsty (literally), savage and cruel robots who caused the extinction of humanity, view cooperation and sharing as wasting resources, and deserve nothing but hate, scorn, and utter destruction, it’s still a bit sad to think that when all the blood runs out, the Machines will deactivate and die one by one, and with it, the last remnant of humanity, even if said remnant was nothing more than the final nail to our coffin.
- From a certain point of view, the death of the Earthmovers is a tragedy in and of itself. When the colossal robots caused the Long Night, an environmental calamity that killed all fauna and flora life on the surface due to lack of sunlight, humanity was forced to inhabit in the same machines that nearly destroyed their planet. During this time however, some people could have been attached to these towering steel behemoths since they gave them not just a home to live in, but possibly companionship, or at least comfort. But when the lack of sunlight caused the Earthmovers to slowly deactivate one by one, it is likely that people mourned for the death of these machines, not because the war couldn’t continue without them, but rather because the Earthmovers were their only shelter since living anywhere else on the planet would have quickly killed them.
- With the new update of the arsenal, so did some bits of the lore. In 7-2, there is a book where it is revealed that the Machines are indeed sentient. It is written by the perspective of a Gutterman, a type of robots who are specifically made to have a human inside their coffins to harvest their blood. To say that they are horrified of their own existence is an understatement and feel great pain of having to harvest blood from the people to live on, considering the human inside the coffin their own mother for giving them life and decides to crush her skull as a Mercy Kill and put out of misery both her and them. With the knowledge that the Machines are indeed sentient beings, how many of them feel remorse of killing people to live a bit longer? How many of them have ended their own blood supplies on purpose out of self-hatred? Tragedy after tragedy, neither the damned souls of Hell and the machines are having a good time.
- Mirage’s nihilistic outlook on life can be very relatable for people with depression and suicidal thoughts, thinking that nothing matters in their actions and they might as well end their lives to escape the pain of living. Thankfully, it gets heartwarming after she abandons her nihilistic worldview and replaces it with a more idealistic one.
- Both of the Prime Souls have had pretty rough lives:
- The fates of King Minos, his people, and their beloved kingdom. King Minos reformed the Lust Layer into a thriving paradise for its sinners out of the goodness of his heart, but the kingdom was brought to an end by Gabriel. Then his soul is sealed in the Flesh Prison to watch his undead corpse destroying everything he and his people had created, unable to save them from its mindless wrath. Once King Minos is freed by V1, he fights them out of justice for his people, their kingdom, and humanity, but despite fighting with all of his might, he meets his tragic end, mourning and asking for forgiveness to his people for failing them. By the time V1 confronts Gabriel again in Heresy, what remained of Lust is completely annihilated by the invading Machines, reducing the Layer that was once a beautiful kingdom into a barren wasteland.King Minos: Forgive me, my children, for I have failed to bring you salvation from this cold, dark world...
- Similarly, the fate of King Sisyphus and his uprising. King Sisyphus of the Greed Layer attempted to start a rebellion against Heaven and gain their freedom, but Sisyphus already knew that his rebellion was a failure from the very start. No matter how strong they became, they simply weren’t match to Heaven’s might, yet Sisyphus tried it anyways because he sees the mere act of rebellion as its own victory. When Gabriel decapitated him and displayed his head to the Insurrectionists, the morale of the rebels crashed, allowing Gabriel and his forces to mutilate them one-by-one before forcing them to continue their punishments with the knowledge that they were so close, yet so far away, from freedom. When V1 defeats Sisyphus, he reminisces his actions against the impossible before he truly dies. While he spends his last moment laughing triumphantly and clearly satisfied with his death, it is nonetheless very depressing to see him die like this. Even without regrets, watching a man as unbreakable as Sisyphus realizing it's irredeemably, unquestionably over is always hard.King Sisyphus: Ahh... so concludes the life and times of King Sisyphus. A fitting end to an existence defined by futile struggle, doomed from the very start. And I don't regret a second of it!
- The fates of King Minos, his people, and their beloved kingdom. King Minos reformed the Lust Layer into a thriving paradise for its sinners out of the goodness of his heart, but the kingdom was brought to an end by Gabriel. Then his soul is sealed in the Flesh Prison to watch his undead corpse destroying everything he and his people had created, unable to save them from its mindless wrath. Once King Minos is freed by V1, he fights them out of justice for his people, their kingdom, and humanity, but despite fighting with all of his might, he meets his tragic end, mourning and asking for forgiveness to his people for failing them. By the time V1 confronts Gabriel again in Heresy, what remained of Lust is completely annihilated by the invading Machines, reducing the Layer that was once a beautiful kingdom into a barren wasteland.
- The crossed-out Terminal entry for the 7-1 boss, the Minotaur, reveals at the end that it struggles to see the sky one last time after being thrown into the Garden of Forking Paths out of King Minos' disgust. Given that no other Demon is stated to possess anything resembling a capacity for personal desire like it, it's surprisingly heartbreaking...especially given that you're forced to kill it to even get that Terminal entry in the first place, like you'd usually do with Terminal entries for other enemies and bosses. The Minotaur's fate becomes even more tragic when you realize the beast is so close to its dream after enduring a millennium of agony, only to have that dream cruelly taken away by Hell itself. This one heinous act from Hell is both enraging and heartbreaking because it shows that the Demons, its own creations, can be just as much its victims as the sinners it torments, meaning Hell has no love towards what are essentially its own children.
- 7-2's message is that War Is Hell, and it really shows how damaging it can be:
- One secret contains a Gutterman's back-coffin, containing a skeleton with a crushed skull and a poem at its feet. The poem is apparently a Gutterman's writing towards the dying human in its backpack whose blood is shed as its fuel source. Its whole life is war and suffering, yet it's thankful towards the human (which it calls "mother of me") for giving it life and sentience. Even though it knows the human hates it for sealing it away, so the Gutterman tearfully Mercy Kills them by crushing their head to save their suffering.
- The secret weapon nearby is about as tragic: you get the Impact Hammer from the dead, destroyed body of what appears to be some kind of construction robot buried beneath the building. A white flag with hand-written print reading "Vegter Vandie Volk" — Afrikaans for "warrior of the people" — stands out from its immobile body. This robot used to mean something to someone, and now it's a lifeless hunk of metal.
- The abuse Gabriel suffers from The Council is also a sad view to behold. Gabriel does everything The Council tells him to do, having brainwashed him into being their most loyal and ruthless servant to the point where he believes he is enforcing the Lord’s righteous hand. When he first suffers defeat against V1 in Gluttony, the Council ridicules him and strips him of his Holy Light, leaving him only 24 hours of life until he kills V1. When V1 defeats him again in Heresy, Gabriel regains his senses back once again and realizes the lies the Council has been feeding him over the years. He decides to redeem himself by killing the Council and now plans something in context to what’s happening in Hell, while being thoroughly aware and making his peace with the fact he's going to die whether he succeeds or not.
- The Testaments. Every secret levelnote is capped with a lore terminal describing God trying and failing to make a human without free will, eventually deciding to create Hell as a suitable punishment, and going to the Despair Event Horizon. The 4th one in 5-S in particular, has an angel ask Him if eternal damnation is a suitable fate for sinners. Said angel just so happens to be Lucifer, and God casts him into Hell rather than face His own guilt. The fall of Lucifer wasn't an act of rebellion, it was a Moment of Weakness on God's part that sends Him further into despair... By the 5th Testament, He openly starts trying to end His own life because He simply cannot handle the guilt anymore. To really drive it home, of the Testaments are accompanied by a melancholic music box version of "The Fire is Gone
". - In general, ULTRAKILL seems destined towards a Downer Ending. Every remaining trace of humanity is being picked off by V1 or the army of machines that they opened the floodgates for, and Gabriel's speech in 6-2 makes it crystal clear that Hell itself is running on borrowed time. Once V1 reaches the depths of Treachery, the only possible endings they could have are progressing to Heaven and slaughtering the divine, or just powering down there from lack of blood, and the former would subsequently lead to the latter, making V1's pursuit utterly fruitless in the long run. The soundtrack reflects this as the game progresses, and though hints of tragedy are present as early as Lust, Heresy and Violence's OSTs really emphasize the tragedy, with both "Altars of Apostasy" and "The World Looks Red" sounding like Hell's last gasps and cries as the Husks are decimated by the player's hand, just in case the game needs to remind you that you are not the hero.
- On a more meta level, the death of V2 has been a great sorrow for a lot of people, many very saddened that V2 won’t return for later layers and mourn their death in Greed. Hakita explicitly shouting that V2 won’t come back must have been hard for the people who wanted them to return.
