Audience Alienating Ending / Video Games

• Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed has an audience-alienating ending In-Universe with the anime Striprism. It's never explained why, but Nana, Kati, and Shizuku all agree that the final episode doesn't hold up to the rest of the series. Tohko, who's clearly not a fan, is just glad it's over.
• Alone in the Dark (2008) appears to be building up to a climactic confrontation with Lucifer, when it suddenly shoves that aside and presents the player with a Sadistic Choice between which protagonist gets possessed by him.
• Asgard's Wrath: The ending of the first game revealing that the lovable characters you encountered and befriended in the tavern were All Just a Dream did not go over well with fans, and neither did Loki successfully escaping and leaving you trapped in his prison, as both things basically made everything the player experienced there feel utterly pointless. Famous video game countdowner Josh Scorcher called it the single worst ending he ever encountered in a video game, even worse than the infamous ending to Mass Effect 3.
• ANNO: Mutationem: The original ending divided a lot of fans, some reviews going so far as to say it ruined the experience. Some complain that the Circle Consortium winning and enslaving Ann at the end of the game is an unsatisfying and left-field way to end the game, and others complain that the entire late game introduces too many elements and new characters then abruptly ends the game when so much was left unexplored, and others (most of whom are unaware about that game being originally part of the SCP universe until it was changed to an original IP) that the sudden shift into the paranormal and supernatural elements from a rather normal Cyberpunk series was just too dramatic of a genre shift. Fortunately, the ending was given a significant extension to completely revamped the aforementioned complaints.
• Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel: The game had already pissed several fans off by dancing around the fate of a character from the previous two games (i.e. not revealing whether they're alive or just missing) and featuring a major plot twist halfway through the game which many feel is completely nonsensical and ruins the characterization of a previously good character for no good reason. Then, to top it off, the final scene throws out some vague hints towards a sequel, which, given the game's disappointing sales and its studio going bankrupt, will likely never happen.
• The Sega Genesis version of Battle Golfer Yui is largely disliked due to these endings: the Downer Ending where the titular protagonist ends up Brainwashed and joins the Big Bad's side if you fail to defeat him. The other one is a True Ending where Yui successfully defeats the Big Bad and the latter makes a Heel–Face Turn. Then, without foreshadowing, an explosion occurs as a result of both Yui and the Big Bad holding hands, killing 20 million people. The worst part? These are the only endings, so no happy endings are available.
• Bayonetta 3 ends with Jeanne being killed by the person that she spent the whole game trying to save, Bayonetta and Luka suddenly getting into a relationship in the final hour of the game before both of them are Dragged Off to Hell, and Viola being declared to be the new Bayonetta despite doing very little to justify it. Cue the Dance Party Ending! Needless to say, the fanbase was not impressed.
• Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea Part 2 ends by revealing the first game was set in motion by Elizabeth's Thanatos Gambit just before Altas/Frank Fontaine brains her to death. Players were upset by how their beloved sidekick that they spent an entire game protecting is denied her happy ending and dies a painful death instead, and ultimately ends up an unknown footnote in the story of Jack Ryan, a Silent Protagonist with no characterization beyond what the player makes him do. On top of that, Elizabeth dies specifically in exchange for the life of a Little Sister, and with the expectation that Jack will one day save her, meaning that her sacrifice can be rendered pointless if the player has Jack harvest the Little Sisters he comes across — or worse, ignore them altogether, leaving them to become Big Sisters at the hands of Sofia Lamb and ultimately killed by Delta or Sigma.
• Call of Duty: Ghosts: Rorke surviving out of thin air and kidnapping Logan for the sake of a Sequel Hook turned off a lot of players.
• Chrono Cross pulls more plot threads out of nowhere in one dungeon than some games pull in their entire length. Chronopolis is already considered That One Level due to its status as a Marathon Level, a large amount of Info Dumps from NPCs throughout the level, and generally difficult random encounters. However, what really seals the dungeon's (and therefore, the game's) fate is the fact that the plot begins to enter full-on Mind Screw territory here in trying to properly tie it to the events of Chrono Trigger. Few of these plot points get properly resolved, it kills one of the characters from Trigger apparently just for the sake of shock value, and very little of it gets explained outside of the aforementioned info dumps if it gets explained at all.
• Corpse Party tends to have some aversion due to its Player Punch endings in Book of Shadows and Blood Covered. Blood Drive (the game that is in theory the Grand Finale of the Heavenly Host saga, as all manga adaptations and mainline games led to this installment due to time loops) takes the cake for not only causing this trope (in the western fandom at least) but also causing a huge division among fans due to its near Downer Ending and being a hope crusher. Because despite all trailers and promotional material might suggest, nobody was revived in Blood Drive, which is one of the main plots of the game. To add insult to injury, not only was Ayumi left in a vegetative state and had all the people's memories of her erased (except Yoshiki, that stayed with her), but the survivors didn't even say goodbye to their dead friends — yet another cause for complaint. The kicker? Dead Patient has expies of characters like Seiko, Mayu...
• Dead Space 3: Awakened ends with Isaac and Carver returning to Earth after destroying the Tau Volantis moon, only to find the Brethren Moons converging upon Earth and their ship, before a Smash to Black. It completely undoes the otherwise Bittersweet Ending of the base game, and renders the entire franchise moot, being one gigantic Shoot the Shaggy Dog moment in the form of negating all the efforts of Isaac and Carter. On top of the game's already divisive reputation, the Awakened DLC is regarded by many fans as salt in the gaping wound. Not helping matters was Visceral Games shutting down some time afterward, rendering the future of the series in doubt (other than a remake of the first game).
• Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter ends with The Reveal that the world of the Raposa is nothing more than a construct of a comatose child, with Wilfre trying to stop the impending Dream Apocalypse by preventing the child (who is the human form of minor character Mike) from ever waking up. The heroes choose to stop Wilfre despite this knowledge, allowing themselves and their world to be sacrificed for Mike to awaken. Needless to say, not many fans were happy knowing all the characters from the past two games that they had grown attached to had been wiped from existence. The Compilation Re-release altered the game's ending to something Lighter and Softer, (namely, Mike's coma being caused by him falling from a tree, rather than a car accident which killed his parents) but this did nothing to address the core issue fans had. The release of Drawn To Life: Two Realms, 11 years later, would ultimately retcon things so that the Raposa world continued to exist after Mike's awakening, easing fan complaints.
• Dying Light: Both of the endings in The Following result in either Crane being turned into a volatile and spreading the infection outside of quarantine, or willingly activating a nuclear warhead to contain the infection by destroying all of Harran and its inhabitants. Suffice to say, the endings hurt many potential players' desire to play the DLC, or even the original game, for that matter. Even the sequel suffered from these plot hooks, only getting sales and ratings on-par with the original despite a vastly improved and expanded-upon movement engine, with almost all of its critical praise boiling down to "story's bad, but the parkour is really fun."
• Fallout 3's ending involves either the Lone Wanderer or Sarah Lyons sacrificing themselves to activate Project Purity by entering a chamber filled with lethal amounts of radiation, which received widespread backlash since the Lone Wanderer has access to three different companions who are outright immune to radiation, yet all of them will refuse to be the one to enter the chamber and flip the switch despite that making far more sense. Even the ghoul who has been brainwashed to obey your every command will just tell you to he isn't going in there, after following every other order from you. Later DLC would add the ability to send in a radiation-immune companion. However, while said companions all got new dialogue to the effect of "Oh yeah, it would make more sense for me to do that, wouldn't it?", the narrator did not, so Ron Perlman still calls you a coward the same as if you had sent in Sarah to die in your place.
• Far Cry 5 plays mostly like its two predecessors, until you've witnessed all three endings and realize there's absolutely no way to bring the Big Bad to justice. You either capitulate right in the intro cinematic, let him get off scot-free during your final encounter and assumingly get yourself brainwashed into killing all your friends afterwards, or you arrest him and thus trigger nuclear armageddon out of absolutely freaking nowhere, which means this raving lunatic was right all along. Doesn't get much more unsatisfying than that. As result, many who have played the game told those who hadn't to not bother with it at all, resulting in a noticeable sales drop from its very popular predecessor. Eventually, a sequel, Far Cry: New Dawn, was released that rectified the ending of 5 by finally allowing players to deal with Joseph. Additionally, the next game retconned the previous entry entirety, as there is no mention of a nuclear war, past or present, and America is perfectly fine, though a DLC reveals that the nukes happened just in Montana.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The Final Fantasy VII Remake was instantly slammed by the old guard once the ending of the first part came to light. Sephiroth (potentially the same Sephiroth from after the events of Advent Children) manipulates Cloud and his friends into killing the "arbiters of fate", leading to alterations in the timeline, the biggest of which is Zack's survival, with the implication that future events will not happen as they were supposed to as now Cloud and co. are aware of them. A lot of this is a case of They Changed It, Now It Sucks! when many players were left convinced that future installments would veer more heavily from the plot of the original. It's also an interesting case of Broken Aesop crossed with Opening a Can of Clones, as the ending introduces several tropes (and has spawned numerous fan theories containing such tropes among others) which many players find 1) antithetical to certain themes from the original and 2) potentially render the entire Remake trilogy inconsequential from a story perspective. The fact that many characters now appear to have been Spared by the Adaptation has also led to accusations of cheapening the story and thus feeling like a Fix Fic. As a result, a considerable number of players who loved Remake prior to the final chapter, along with more skeptical fans who were waiting for word-of-mouth, turned on it after the ending's revelations came to light, and expressed that they have no interest in parts 2 and 3 if the ending is a sign of where the series will be going. Granted, the exact ramifications and extent of such changes are as yet unknown, and some have interpreted them as an attempt to salvage the otherwise divisive Compilation and better incorporate its materials into the original game’s narrative, and are thus more curious about the series' future.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2, the second part of an already divisive trilogy, ends with Caius winning and destroying the world, no matter what the player does, and your reward for getting 100% Completion is The Stinger that just consists of Caius taunting you for thinking you could get a better ending. While clearly intended to be a Second Chapter Cliffhanger, so many fans found this (along with the other disliked parts of the game) a giant slap in the face for all the time and effort required to beat the game that when Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, the third and final part, came out and ultimately provided a Belated Happy Ending, it only barely achieved half the sales that XIII-2 did.
• The endings of all the routes in Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes have been heavily criticized for not resolving the plot and leaving the audience hanging, with Golden Wildfire's ending being particularly ambiguous. They all end in such a way that suggests a continuation is coming, but as the game received no DLC, instead each ending just happens and leaves the story feeling incomplete. Azure Gleam's ending has additionally been criticized for leaving Edelgard in a brainwashed state with no indication that she will ever recover, and Dimitri leaving her behind in a way that many feel is brutally out of character for him, turning some fans off from playing the route entirely. Developer interviews revealing that the inconclusive endings were intentional so as to not "invalidate" Byleth and any choices players made in Fire Emblem: Three Houses only added more fuel to the fire.
• Seto and Ren from Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon head out together in search of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world, but the ending narration features an aged Seto in a voiceover claiming Ren died some time afterwards and he's all alone again. Within context, this is nonsensical because the point of the story is to state how alone Seto isn't thanks to the number of Non Player Characters who accompany him on his journey, insisting You Are Not Alone; Seto's monologue puts him back to square one, which he was trying to avoid from the start of the game. What should have amounted to a Bittersweet Ending^note A post-story Manga explicitly mentions Ren is a sick girl with Your Days Are Numbered, tying into her impending demise instead winds up becoming an Esoteric Happy Ending.
• Haven: Call of the King ends with Haven betrayed by his best friend Chess, who was a mole for Lord Vetch all along, Athelion being killed and Haven being chained on a rock alongside Athelion's lifeless body for all eternity, leaving Vetch free to conquer the rest of the galaxy. This was the first game of a planned trilogy, but since the game sold poorly and had a mediocre reception, those plans were axed.
• Hitman 2 ends with a Twist Ending; that Grey was strongly implied to be working with Arthur Edwards as his escape was shown simultaneously with Grey receiving a text from Olivia (who her and Diana were keeping him hostage) that "everything is going according to plan", when it clearly wasn't. This was not well liked within the fanbase, as it undermined Grey's Well-Intentioned Extremist characterisation in the cutscenes and comics, and ruined a character fans were really starting to warm up to. It felt like the writers were attempting to create a Twist Ending for the sakes of it; continuity and characterisation be damned! Thankfully, the developers looked at this backlash, and the ending didn't stick, and was rewritten for Hitman 3; Grey undergoes Character Rerailment in that they don't keep Edwards' escape a secret, Edwards' escape was not planned out, but was Edwards persuading a sailor to set him free (a skill that was well-established in 2016 and 2, and was considerably more believable), and the story continues to emphasize 47 and Grey's relationship, instead of trying to break it up so unconvincingly and forcefully.
• Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak has the protagonists Doomed by Canon, as they end up directly responsible for setting the events of the first game in motion... including the part where it turns out everything your enemies were fighting to prevent ended up happening. Oops.
• Infidel ends with your Villain Protagonist suffering a Karmic Death, which didn't fly at all with players in 1983 who expected a reward for their efforts in completing the game, especially after being Blamed for Being Railroaded. The backlash resulted in Infocom receiving tons of hate mail over the ending, popular game critic Scorpia, despite being a fan of Infocom, refusing to review the game, the third-party hintbook The Book of Adventure Games encouraging readers to create alternate endings, and Infidel languishing in obscurity compared to other Infocom games such as Zork and Planetfall.
• Jimi-Kare, an otherwise ordinary and completely family-friendly Free-to-Play otome-focused mobile game, is mostly known for its Bad Ending where it is heavily implied that Haru (the male lead) sexually assaults the player character.
• Kingdom Hearts III got some serious flak with the revelation that the Big Bad, Xehanort, turned out to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist after all, and many saw him as too Easily Forgiven by the heroes despite being the man who unleashed darkness across many worlds, the man responsible for ruining countless lives, and the man who flat-out murdered Kairi in the same game just to provide motivation, leaving his defeat to be utterly unsatisfying. There is also the issue that everyone in the cast got their happy ending... except Sora and Kairi as the former has just sacrificed himself to save the latter using a vaguely explained ability, leaving them separated once again in a ploy that many fans found to be a cheap Sequel Hook that could take decades to resolve. Fortunately, a DLC expansion named Re:Mind set after the events of the story (but before the final scene and The Stinger) with the surviving characters (alongside returning Final Fantasy characters who were absent in the main game) tying up loose ends while giving them a chance to shine one last time. While not perfect—for one thing, you still have to pay $30 US for something that, depending on whom you ask, should have been in the game to begin with—it gave a better finale to the characters than the vanilla game, which many found to be rushed and unsatisfactory.
• The Last of Us Part II: The game was already fairly bleak starting on a Downer Beginning with Joel being brutally killed by Abby for the revenge of her father which already didn't sit well with the fanbase. But after going through all the trials and tribulations of the leads, it ends with Ellie having nothing at the end of the game. She foregoes her revenge on Abby at the last minute and lets her live, but comes home to find Dina and the baby they raised together having left which Dina had threatened to do if she went through with going after Abby one more time. Two of her fingers were bitten off in the final fight meaning she can no longer play guitar, the last remnant of Joel she had left and wandering off into an unknown future. One can argue that Abby lost all of her friends due to her revenge, but she at least had Lev and the hope of finding a firefly base by the end of her story. Sure no one was expecting a major happy ending given the game's setting. Still, the ending utterly soured what goodwill most players were willing to give the game, who felt like nothing was accomplished at the end of the day and topped off a pretty miserable story.
• Magical Starsign's ending is heavily disliked, as not only does the person you were trying to save the whole game die, the epilogue has every character acting against the development they received or getting all-new hopes and dreams. The romance is also left unresolved.
• Mass Effect 3 has gained a reputation of being to Video Games what Lost is to Live-Action Television and what Neon Genesis Evangelion is to anime (something made especially infamous by an interview with the developers pre-release, which mentioned Lost by name and explicitly promised that the ending wouldn't be anything like that). Many factors contributed to the uproar, ranging from the endings' lackluster integration with the trilogy's elaborate, multi-game-spanning Choice-and-Consequence System^note it ends with a Last-Second Ending Choice between 3 (4 with DLC) options, whose availability depends on a single number (Galactic Readiness) to which all previous story choices are reduced and Karma Meter^note the trilogy's story choices all revolve around the moral dualism of Paragon vs. Renegade, but its endings jarringly break away from this formula in the last second, to their underlying premise being thematically at odds with several major storylines of the trilogy^note the reason given for Shepard's Sadistic Choice at the end is that all synthetic lifeforms inevitably turn on their organic creators; meanwhile, the trilogy at large has stressed again and again that such conflicts can be resolved before they escalate into mutural extermination (see: Rannoch storyline, Legion and EDI's arcs). The overwhelmingly poorly received original ending scared off numerous potential players, although the company later released DLC that made the endings more palatable and reduced the effect to some degree. The next game, Mass Effect: Andromeda, is only tangentially related to the original trilogy, with a new cast and setting completely divorced from and unaffected by the infamous ending. The announcement of a new Mass Effect game in November 2020, confirmed to take place after 3, raised hopes that said ending could be made null and void for good, while the release of the Legendary Edition means that the most accessible version of 3 is one with the extended-ending DLC attached by default, helping to ease some of the issues.
• Mega Man Legends 2 ended with Mega Man Volnutt stranded on the moon, and Roll and Tron beginning construction on a rocketship to rescue him. Unfortunately, the third game was cancelled and Keiji Inafune left Capcom, so the story will likely never be concluded. By proxy, the ending of Legends 2 also counts as this trope for the entire Classic Mega Man timeline (Legends currently serving as the last point in that continuity, long after the events of the original, X, Zero, and ZX), as DEATH BATTLE! puts it best during the "Mega Man Battle Royale" episode.
  Boomstick: Woah woah woah woah, don't try and pull that Happily Ever After crap! Humanity went extinct! The planet is flooded, and the last Mega Man is stuck in space forever because Legends 3 is never gonna happen! That peaceful future Dr. Light fought so hard for turned out to be total bullshit! And if you think about it, it's all his fault! LOVE AND PEACE ARE LIES, GOD IS DEAD, AND WE'RE ALL TOTALLY ***ED!
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty's ending has a sufficient reputation for being bizarre and incomprehensible to bring about this trope. There's some stuff about memes, genetic memory, passing the torch, and America's destiny in a narration by Solid Snake. The game also has Liquid Ocelot still at large and Olga's child still captive by the end, despite this originally being penned to be the final game in the series. There's also a little kind-of-but-not-really closure with Raiden and Rose, with the lack of any closure being compounded by a last-second Mind Screw in The Stinger. The general consensus is that the ending is definitely meant to say something... it's just hard to tell what exactly it said.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain ends with The Reveal that the "Big Boss" players had been controlling throughout the entire game had been nothing more than a Body Double for the real Big Boss who had been constructing the real Outer Heaven, cue credits and timeline scroll. Many were unhappy with this ending given the game had been promoted as the story of Big Boss becoming the monster we saw in Metal Gear, with fans feeling this reveal cheapened the game's entire premise. Not helping matters is the game's Troubled Production meant there were several plot threads Left Hanging, no Final Boss, and the game's last mission just being a repeat of the Tutorial Level.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Mortal Kombat 9 had this thanks to a desire by franchise co-creator Ed Boon to create a completely new cast of characters for the next game. For this to happen, they killed off nearly the entire cast at the end of Story Mode in a very sloppy fight scene where the Earthrealm warriors are killed off one by one by Sindel and turned into evil undead revenants. The purpose of this scene was clearly to allow for a roster full of new characters in the next game. However, the ensuing fan backlash over the deaths of iconic characters like Kung Lao, Sub-Zero, Jax, Kitana and Jade and promising reimagined characters like Smoke forced them to include non-canonical older versions in the roster of Mortal Kombat X (except for Sub-Zero and Jax, who were fully revived). This was most notable with Mortal Kombat 11 as its story brings the younger versions of Liu Kang, Kung Lao, Kitana, and Jade (alongside a pre-Character Development Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, and a younger and optimistic Jax) into the present to fight their evil undead versions.
  • The ending of the vanilla Mortal Kombat 11 story has also become this as it ends with the current timeline erased and the promise of a new timeline. Aftermath was later released that allowed players to choose between a more fulfilling good ending or having Shang Tsung win.
• No Man's Sky is very open-ended, but one of its goals is to get to the center of the galaxy. Upon doing so, players are immediately teleported to a different galaxy, with absolutely no reward for their efforts, causing many to conclude that the ending was a disappointing payoff.
• Outlast:
  • Outlast II: Blake fails to save Lynn as she dies in childbirth. Afterwards, cult leader Knoth tells Blake that his child is The Antichrist and there is nothing they can do to stop it. Knoth and all his remaining followers then commit mass suicide and Blake attempts to escape but then the sun explodes. What's worse is the sun exploding is implied to a hallucination, leaving Blake's fate a mystery.
  • Outlast: The Murkoff Account explains some of what is actually going on. Lynn experienced a psychosomatic (aka fake) pregnancy, the baby she gave birth to isn't real, and Blake, Knoth, and Knoth's followers are just all collectively hallucinating due to being driven insane via a brainwashing experiment over the radio. However, the comic also explains that Blake, while alive, has been dragged off to be experimented on by Murkoff. Either way, the protagonists are either dead or very likely doomed.
• River City Girls got hit by this fast and hard because of how drastic and out of nowhere the ending initially feels. Kunio and Riki were not only not kidnapped, but it turns out that Misako and Kyoko aren't their girlfriends, Hasabe and Mami are. The entire game was two ditzy Stalker with a Crush Ex-Girlfriends tearing up a city for the sake of a relationship that doesn't exist, for two guys who weren't in any danger and don't even know they exist or that they're fighting for them. In response to the backlash, however, a patch was released that changed the ending to be less mean-spirited, with the original ending being Retgone.
• The finale of the Dwarves' questline in RuneScape was controversial for its big twist. Turns out you'd already won in the penultimate quest and didn't know it, with your victory in that quest convincing the bad guys to give up. The only reason they're fighting you is that you attacked them first in anticipation of an attack that was never going to come. In the end, the two main villains sort-of commit suicide because you won't leave them alone.
• Shenmue III, which released eighteen years after the previous installment. While the title was widely derided for its shoddy technical quality and archaic game design decisions, fans were far more irritated that the game not only ended on yet another cliffhanger, with no certainty of a fourth game ever coming out thanks to its middling reception, but that the story itself failed to meaningly advance the narrative.
• Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time: The game ends on a massive Cliffhanger that would have been a great Sequel Hook... except that (depending on whom you ask) either Sanzaru Games had no plans to make a sequel and wrap up the game's plot, or Sanzaru did want to make a DLC or sequel but got shot down by Sony due the game's sales figure. The game itself is a Contested Sequel to the first three games (with the late-game reveal that Penelope is now unrepentantly evil overshadowing everything else about the game), and with that plus the cliffhanger being a major Downer Ending when taken on its own, fans just don't want the series to end that way.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood ends with Eggman having successfully conquered the Earth while Sonic and Co. were busy fighting the titular Brotherhood in the Twilight Cage. The game then cuts to credits while Sonic and Co. talk about how big of a cliffhanger the ending was and how they can't wait for the sequel. Said sequel never materialized due to Bioware closing its handheld gaming division following their acquisition by Electronic Arts, in addition to legal problems Sega was having with former Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) writer Ken Penders, who not only claimed he owned the characters he created for the comic, but that Sonic Chronicles ripped off said characters.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 4 was originally going to be a trilogy, but thanks to the mixed reception of both episodes, the third episode was canceled and the second episode ended with Little Planet trapped inside the Death Egg Mk. II. Even collecting all the Chaos Emeralds does nothing, as the Sequel Hook cutscene was removed before the game's release.
• Lots of players have stated they didn't mind The Suicide of Rachel Foster's plot and could've viewed it as a decent Environmental Narrative Game if it weren't for the ending, due to it never actively condemning Leonard's actions and instead pushing all the blame on his wife; while she is certainly guilty of killing Rachel, the narrative glosses over the married Leonard having an inappropriate relationship with a teenager, and seems to present him sympathetically. Both protagonists abruptly committing suicide, or alternatively Nicole going insane, also made the whole thing seem pointless and unnecessarily bleak to some players.
• In The Stinger of Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow, Gabe and Lian, discussing possible retirement, return to their gym hideout to find Lawrence dead and Teresa critically wounded at the hands of Trinidad, who proceeds to gun down Gabe as well, although he takes her out with a Last Breath Bullet. Cue Fade to Black with Lian performing CPR on Gabe. Sony has officially stated that they are done with the series. Years after the release of Logan's Shadow, the series was brought back by Sony in the form of Days Gone, which takes place in the same universe.
• Thimbleweed Park: The four Player Characters (aka Delores, Agent Ray, Agent Reyes, and Ransome The Clown) all break into the Pillow Tronics Factory (each for their own reasons) and discover that the factory AI has merged with a copy Chuck's (Delores' Uncle) brain and is planning to take over the town and below. After Delores shuts down a few of the computer's cores, Chuck reveals the truth: that Thimbleweed Park is just a video game and that they are all video game characters playing out a story. He then provides the characters with items to quickly wrap up their respective storylines before Delores shuts off the game entirely. Not only are the incredibly rushed conclusions unsatisfying (with Ransome's being the only possible exception), many of the games other plot points are abandoned entirely (you never find out who killed Boris or Franklin and you never prove Willie's innocence). Even worse, you don't even have to resolve the other characters' stories to finish the game, as the credits roll if you do Delores' part. Many felt the game took its fourth wall breaking way too far and deprived the game of a meaningful conclusion as a result.
• Twelve Minutes: Enthusiasm for the game died pretty quick once word got out about the Twist Ending, which implies that the whole game was All Just a Dream as a man copes with the revelation that his lover is his half-sister.
• XIII, a Licensed Game based on the first five volumes of the Belgian comic book series of the same name, ends with a "To Be Continued" after The Reveal of The Man Behind the Man. The game's poor sales meant that no further adaptations of the comics would be made.

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