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15 Video Games Where the Good Ending Was Actually the Worst Outcome

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Happy ending, terrible choice.

Nazarii Verbitskiy

Gaming - September 12th 2026, 11:00 GMT+2

Dishonored — 15. Dishonored (2012)
Corvo can finish Dishonored without killing a single named target, and Arkane built an entire chaos system to reward that restraint. Low chaos gets you a bright ending where Emily grows up safe and the city recovers. That outcome also means Corvo let a fascist regime consolidate power instead of gutting it. Harvey Smith has talked about wanting players to feel the weight of mercy, not just the points for it. | © Bethesda Softworks

The Walking Dead Season One 2012 1 — 14. The Walking Dead: Season One (2012)
Lee Everett dies in every version of The Walking Dead: Season One, so the only real choice is who raises Clementine's expectations for what people owe each other. Telltale built five episodes around trust, then closed the book by having an eight year old decide who lives. Players who picked the merciful path often watched Clementine internalize a code that gets her hurt later in the series. The ending people call good is the one that costs her the most. | © Telltale Games

Metro Exodus — 13. Metro Exodus (2019)
Artyom reaches the coast in Metro Exodus and finds Novosibirsk's survivors a new home, away from the tunnels that defined the first two games. Getting there requires a specific run of moral choices, mostly about who Artyom refuses to kill even when killing would be easier. 4A Games measured that path against a version where the Aurora crashes and everyone on it dies. The reward for playing gently is leaving behind almost everything the trilogy built. | © Deep Silver

The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt — 12. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)
Ciri becomes Empress of Nilfgaard at the end of one branch of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and CD Projekt Red frames it as her strongest possible future. She gets there by inheriting the exact throne her grandfather Emhyr used to hunt her for two games. Geralt spends sixty hours trying to keep her free of politics, only to hand her the biggest political cage in the setting. Nobody who romanced her expected the happy ending to look like a coronation. | © Bandai Namco Entertainment

Mass Effect 3 — 11. Mass Effect 3 (2012)
"Shepard, we can rebuild the mass relays," says nobody in Mass Effect 3, because the Control ending quietly implies the galaxy's entire faster than light network just got wrecked. Casey Hudson's team gave players three colored endings in 2012, and the backlash was loud enough to force a free Extended Cut in 2012 as well. Control lets Shepard become a godlike AI ruling the galaxy for its own good. That is the ending fans voted friendliest, and it hands one person control over every species alive. | © Electronic Arts

Cyberpunk 2077 — 10. Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)
Six months is what the Devil ending gives V, alone in a Night City apartment with a bottle and no plan. CD Projekt Red built five other paths out of Cyberpunk 2077, and the one fans call happiest still ends in a body count and a goodbye. Johnny gets to walk away in Arasaka's stolen jet while V stays behind to die slow. Picking the ending with the fewest funerals just changes whose funeral it is. | © CD Projekt Red

Cropped shadow of the colossus — 9. Shadow of the Colossus (2005)
Wander drags his sword through sixteen colossi to bring Mono back, and Shadow of the Colossus rewards him with a baby that might be him reborn as a horned demon. Fumito Ueda never spelled out whether that ending counts as a win. The temple crumbles, Agro falls, and Mono wakes up in a garden that used to be forbidden. Getting exactly what you came for is the part that should worry you. | © Sony Interactive Entertainment

Red Dead Redemption 2 — 8. Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)
Arthur Morgan gets to choose how he dies, and the kindest version still ends with tuberculosis and a mountain sunrise. Rockstar gave players a "high honor" finish where Arthur saves John and dies looking at the sky instead of getting shot in the back. John walks off the ranch anyway once Micah and the Pinkertons come for what's left. The gentlest death in Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't buy anyone a future. | © Rockstar Games

SOMA — 7. SOMA (2015)
Simon Jarrett uploads into the ARK at the end of SOMA, drifting through a simulated ocean while the real him suffocates back on the sea floor. Frictional Games built the whole finale around a split you don't get to stop. Both Simons believe they're the one who made it out. The game just lets you sit with which one you were rooting for. | © Frictional Games

Cropped Bio Shock Infinite — 6. BioShock Infinite (2013)
Booker DeWitt drowns himself in 1893 to erase every version of Comstock, and BioShock Infinite treats that as the closest thing to peace it can offer. Ken Levine wrote an ending where success means Elizabeth was never born and Columbia never falls the way we watched it fall. The lighthouse doors close on infinite versions of the same choice. Undoing your own existence is a strange thing to call a happy ending. | © 2K Games

Nier Automata — 5. NieR: Automata (2017)
Yoko Taro built five separate endings into NieR: Automata, and Ending E asks players to delete their own save data. 2B, 9S, and A2 all die getting there, and the game makes you sacrifice your progress to help a stranger online finish theirs. That trade only works if enough players keep choosing it, which is the entire point Taro buried in the mechanic. Calling E the happy ending ignores that it costs you the save file proving you ever played. | © Square Enix

Silent Hill 2 — 4. Silent Hill 2 (2001)
James Sunderland carries his dead wife's body up a staircase near the end of Silent Hill 2, and what he says to it decides which of six endings plays. "In Water" has him walk into the lake with her corpse still in his arms. "Leave" is the one strategy guides call correct, where James drives off with Maria and starts over. Konami never confirmed a canon ending in 2001, and the ambiguity is the actual design, not a gap in it. | © Konami

The Last of Us Part II — 3. The Last of Us Part II (2020)
Abby has Ellie's throat under a knife on a beach in Santa Barbara, and Ellie lets her go. Nothing gets fixed by that mercy. Ellie loses the fingers she needs to play guitar, loses Dina, and returns to an empty farmhouse with nobody left to forgive her for any of it. Neil Druckmann built a revenge story where stopping the cycle looks identical to losing everything the cycle was supposed to protect. | © Sony Interactive Entertainment

Far Cry 5 — 2. Far Cry 5 (2018)

A nuclear warhead detonates near Hope County at the end of Far Cry 5, and Joseph Seed turns out to have been right about the collapse the entire time. Players who refused to arrest a suspect in the opening minutes get a shorter, quieter game and skip the bombs entirely. Ubisoft shipped a story in 2018 where the "good" ending rewards doing your job as a deputy with the end of the world. Walking away was the only move that kept anyone alive. | © Ubisoft

Spec Ops The Line — 1. Spec Ops: The Line (2012)
Captain Martin Walker survives Dubai in one ending of Spec Ops: The Line, and it plays like the game punishing you for wanting it. Yager Development built white phosphorus into a mission players walk through without warning, and the corpses underneath are civilians. Getting Walker out alive means he's still lying to himself in the final cutscene about what he did to get there. The loading screens ask "Do you feel like a hero yet?" and the ending where he lives is the one that answers it. | © 2K Games

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Games love to reward you with a "good" ending, but look closer and some of those triumphant finales lead to far darker outcomes than the so-called bad ones. Here are 15 video games where the good ending was actually the worst outcome.

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Games love to reward you with a "good" ending, but look closer and some of those triumphant finales lead to far darker outcomes than the so-called bad ones. Here are 15 video games where the good ending was actually the worst outcome.