The difference between a good story and a great story can often be the climax. Ever since video games have started having elaborate narratives, developers have been going all out to make sure they tell the best of tales. And because of this, fans have gotten a chance to experience some of the best stories ever, all the while playing some really fun games. From Call of Duty: Black Ops to Bioshock, there’s no shortage of games with excellent stories. But not all games land the ending.

Sticking the landing is another ball game altogether. It’s not very often that fans get their hands on a game that tells a great story and ends it in an equally excellent manner. But at the same time, there are some that knock it out of the park. Forgive us for leaving out any of your favorites. Here are 10 games with the best endings:

The Last of Us

As far as endings go, TLOU is a no brainer. Joel, a smuggler, has to get Ellie to a hospital in Seattle. Why? The fireflies have a doctor who can use Ellie’s immunity to create a vaccine via surgery to bring an end to the horrors of the dystopia. But the catch? The surgery means Ellie will die.

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Throughout the game, players form an emotional bond with the protagonists, so it would have been incredibly painful if Ellie died. Now think from Joel’s point of view. After losing his daughter right at the beginning, he was moments away from losing Ellie, who was the closest thing he had to a daughter. His choices were to let them go ahead with the surgery and lose Ellie but possibly bring an end to the pandemic, or save Ellie at any cost. Joel goes with the latter. And hiding the truth from her, he assures her she remains guilt-free.

With TLOU, the beginning was as emotionally heavy as the ending was dark. Players who like a good story need to play TLOU.

Bioshock

A first-person shooter about a guy who finds himself surviving various horrors in an underwater city. He eventually gets in contact with various people who ask him to find and kill one named Andrew Ryan, the creator of this underwater “Utopia.”

As players kill everything in their way to kill Ryan, he looks them in the eye and reveals to them something horrific. He reminds them how everyone uses the term “would you kindly” before making a request to the player. And a player, being a player, simply does what they are asked. In reality, the protagonist was brainwashed in his childhood to do anything he was asked without questioning if the words “would you kindly” are spoken before telling them what to do. It’s an excellent meta-commentary on how players do anything they are asked to in video games, and it has an excellent twist.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Mason spends a part of his life in a gulag called Vorkuta. He makes friends there, and he escapes that prison with the help of his friends. One of those friends is Viktor Reznov, a Red Army soldier. Reznov keeps reminding Mason of his own enemies. As they escape, Reznov seemingly dies.

Mason carries on his life as a CIA operative, completing various missions through the years. During that time, he also ends up killing two of Reznov’s sworn enemies and finds out Reznov escaped alive when Mason thought he had died. Eventually, it is revealed that Mason was actually brainwashed in Vorkuta. And taking advantage of the situation, Reznov gave his brainwashed mind the names of his own enemies. Reznov dies during the escape, and Mason keeps seeing him while he completes his deed. This was a mind-blowing twist that no Call of Duty game has been able to recreate as of yet.

SOMA

This is an excellent survival horror game made by the creators of Amnesia. And they have every single one of their flavors in this game, too. A man explores a facility full of machines that have the minds of dead people uploaded to them. And Androids with human consciences think they themselves are human.

As players walk through this uniquely horrifying world in search of a way to escape, they find out that their own character is an android. And they have to upload themselves to a computer, as this facility will soon be destroyed along with the earth. This game presents the horrors that are written in the future of humanity in a very down-to-earth manner.

Portal 2

In this game, the protagonist, Chell, goes around solving puzzles for an AI called GlaDos. It controls Aperture laboratories and has seemingly trapped Chell in a deadly cycle of tests. Eventually, Chell causes GlaDos to lose her hold over the facility, and this leads to her and this AI bonding. As she helps GlaDos once again take over the laboratories, the AI decides to free her.

When she rises from her prison to the surface, it is revealed that she is in a huge wheat field. But the biggest revelation is that this game is actually set in the Half-Life universe, and now Chell is set free in it.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Starting as an outlaw, Arthur Morgan lives his life as a rough man, never caring for what others think. He snatched people’s money; he killed; he robbed. And eventually, he learns that everything he has been doing is not going to matter at all. Because a guy he roughed at the beginning of the game for a meager amount of money gave him TB.

Arthur dies in the end, saving his friends in an attempt to redeem himself. Red Dead Redemption 2’s story has so many layers to it. And this ending ties everything together.

Metal Gear Solid 3

When a soldier is sent to bring back a stolen nuclear weapon. As he is investigating this, he finds out that his mentor has joined enemy forces and is helping them with their deeds. This does not sit well with him, and he tries to contact her, but she does not respond.

Eventually, under the pressure of his superiors, he has to take down the terrorist organization and his mentor. And then he finds out that his mentor was actually undercover, but now it’s too late to reveal this to the world. He has to kill her with his own hands. A very emotional ending was crucial in creating one of the most legendary gray-shaded characters in gaming, Big Boss. Metal Gear Solid 3 is no doubt a mind-blowing game.

Batman: Arkham City

Batman enters an open prison known as Arkham City to find out the true intention behind its creation. As he explores the place, he finds out that something called Protocol 10 will begin very soon. Now he has to find out what it is, stop it, find Hugo Strange, and ask him his true intentions. On his way to all these answers, he comes across none other than Ra’s Al Ghul. The ancient legend once again offers Bruce Wayne the leadership position in his organization, which he refuses. As all this is going on, Joker is in a very bad state thanks to injuries he suffered at the end of Arkham Asylum.

At the end of the game, Batman fails to find a cure to Joker’s problems, and he fails to stop Protocol 10. Further, he finds out that Hugo Strange was actually charged by Ra’s Al Ghul to collect all of Gotham City’s criminals in one place and destroy them. This was called Protocol 10. The game ends with numerous casualties, with one of them being Batman’s oldest enemy, the Joker.

Braid

Probably one of the most overlooked games of all time. Tim searches for his princess, who has been stolen by an evil monster. In his search, he passes through numerous worlds and eventually reaches his destination. As he gets there, he is shown escaping with the princess as most of the world runs in reverse.

As this reverse thing stops, players are shown who Tim really was. He was the monster Princess was trying to escape from, and the person he saw as a monster was in fact a knight who saved the princess from Tim. In the end, Tim is just a deluded man who ignores his wrongdoings.

Spec Ops: The Line

A group of soldiers enter a destroyed Dubai in the near future. They are looking for a rogue soldier who is basically causing a lot of trouble. They meet a bunch of resistance from their enemies, and they are attacked a bunch of times. At one point, they find a weapon that covers an area in white phosphorus. Players use it to kill an area full of enemies; it turns out those were never enemies but a bunch of civilians, women, and children. After that, the whole game passes as the protagonist spends all his time blaming his actions on someone else.

It turns out that the enemy he was looking for all this time was death. And the protagonist, Walker, started hallucinating him alive to justify his own actions. The story is pretty mind-blowing, and the ending is equally devastating, stating the mindset of most soldiers out there.

From Red Dead Redemption 2 to Silent Hill 2, These Games Should Be Introduced in College Courses for Film Studies

These are some of the games with the best endings. This list was not easy to compile, as there are numerous games that still remain that have excellent resolutions.

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