Top 20 Most Disturbing Video Game Endings

TellTale's The Walking Dead is another franchise that hinges on player choices to shape the game's outcomes. It also hinges on the fragility of my heart - I don’t even know if that makes sense, I’m just trying to say I’m a crybaby and I hated the end of Episode 1. Despite his choices, Lee, the main character, will inevitably be bitten by a walker. This results in a poignant moment where Clementine, the young girl Lee rescued during the outbreak and came to see as a daughter, must kill Lee to prevent him from turning. It's a classic zombie trope, and for good reason. It causes a grown man to cry every time. Me... I’m the grown man.

We’ve got twenty entries to get through and I don’t have time to explain the plot of a 30-year-old game, so we’re getting to the point: Ending F. If specific conditions aren't fulfilled by the time Jennifer arrives at the clock tower, Ending F is activated. In this ending, Jennifer steps into an elevator, and the doors shut behind her. After a brief silence, a loud crash is heard, followed by screaming and the frantic clatter of scissors. Blood then starts to seep from beneath the elevator doors, and the screen fades to black as Scissor Man's laughter echoes. Despite its basic graphics and sound effects, it’s deeply disturbing, especially after spending the whole damn game with Jennifer.

Throughout the campaign of Dead Space, Isaac is on a desperate quest to save his girlfriend, Nicole, who was working on the spaceship Ishimura. In a shocking twist, it’s revealed that Nicole has been dead the entire time (oooooh, it’s actually a great reveal, even if it does seem cliche). The Marker’s hallucinations have deceived Isaac into believing she is still alive, driving him deeper into his own delusions. The truth is that Nicole had died long before Isaac arrived at the Ishimura. The ending of Dead Space is a striking and memorable narrative choice that sticks with players long after the game concludes.

There was a beautiful patch of PC point-and-click adventures that truly just let it fly. Is that too much for a video game? Not for a point-and-click PC game nobody will probably play. In Harvester, at the end of the story, players can choose to reject the cult and achieve the good ending, or they can opt for Steve to brutally murder his girlfriend, tear out her skull, and present it to the cult. I’m not joking. This act ultimately frees Steve from their control, so he can then escape with a stranger whom he later kills and consumes... Again, I’m not joking. The scene takes a disturbing turn as the camera follows Steve's actions, entering his throat and stomach to reveal the remains of the stranger being slowly digested, all while his mother berates him about how violent video games will corrupt his mind. Ironic.

At the end of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator (which I never expected to talk about on a Mojo video), players face a final showdown with the animatronics. After managing the pizzeria, players must survive one last night where they’re attacked by the remaining animatronics. The game concludes with a purging sequence where the pizzeria is set ablaze, destroying the haunted animatronics and the remnants of the cursed establishment. The music, the voice over, the creepy visuals… Who’d have thought such a small game could make our skin crawl uncontrollably.

Although each ending in Singularity has its own dark themes. If the player chooses to align with Barisov, he becomes a tyrannical ruler with control over the world, exploiting the time anomalies to reshape it according to his vision. He acts much like a dictator. A LOT like a dictator. He is a dictator. This ending results in a dystopian future where Barisov's oppressive regime dominates, eventually making you guys the two most powerful men in the world. You ultimately split and face each other in an unmatched world war, showcasing a darker outcome of the player's decisions.

In the Childhood's Beginning ending of Bloodborne, the protagonist becomes a Great One after defeating the final boss, Mergo. Upon completing the ritual and accepting the Great One’s cosmic influence, the Hunter transforms into an infant Great One, symbolizing a new beginning. The ending reveals the Hunter's evolution into a cosmic entity, joining the ranks of the ancient and enigmatic beings they sought to understand. The crying monstrosity that you become is hard to wrap your head around, as you become connected with the protagonist, and seeing him in this form is not exactly fun.

In Outlast, after enduring one of the worst nights imaginable, locked in the asylum with inmates corrupted by a mysterious force, Miles uncovers the truth about the facility. As Miles tries to end Hope's control over the Walrider, he becomes possessed by it, and in a tragic twist, just as Miles is about to leave, a military unit arrives and shoots him down without giving him a chance to explain or escape. After surviving all manner of supernatural creatures and inmates, it makes it so much worse that you are eventually killed by normal people. Seriously?

The often forgotten The Park is a psychological horror game that immerses players in the role of a grieving mother searching for her missing son in an amusement park where he was reportedly lost. The game is deeply unsettling, featuring unique scares and mechanics that more mainstream titles might shy away from. As the game nears its end, it is revealed that the son has been missing for a long time due to the mother's negligence. The Boogeyman manipulates her into stabbing her son through the heart, but he vanishes, forcing her to commit the act herself. Basically, you’ve been playing as a pretty terrible mother this whole time.

Welcome to Layer of Fear, the only game to ever make a little bit of urine come out of my body. I wish I was joking. The game guides players through an ever-shifting mansion reminiscent of Silent Hills' PT, as they gradually uncover the truth about their wife's fate. It is revealed that the artist has been using her remains as materials for his portraits. In the bad ending, the artist completes a portrait of his wife, only for it to transform into a monstrous figure that mocks him. He then discards the painting in a dark room filled with similar discarded artworks, expressing his belief that he is trapped in an unending cycle. It truly makes Van Gogh cutting his ear off look like child’s play.

We’re being bad boys by actually combining a few games into one entry, because each game in the Little Nightmares series offers more information to make each ending twice as disturbing as the last. In the first game, players control Six, a yellow raincoat-clad hero who resorts to extreme and disturbing measures to survive. From consuming a gnome to ultimately killing and devouring the Lady, Six’s morality is questionable. After defeating the Lady, Six acquires her powers and uses them to annihilate all the guests. The sequel introduces Mono as the new protagonist. Six reappears and allies with Mono, but the ending is even more unsettling than the first game. As Mono dangles from a crumbling platform and depends on Six for help, Six chooses to let Mono fall, sealing him to a truly terrifying fate. Never meet your heroes, kids.

Fatal Frame II features several endings, like a lot of entries on this list, but the darkest is the Frozen Butterfly Ending. In this scenario, Mayu becomes possessed, but the ghost controlling her is defeated before Mio is compelled to kill her through strangulation. In this ending, however, Mayu turns the tables and strangles Mio to death instead. The end-credit scenes of Fatal Frame II - Frozen Butterfly Ending are especially disturbing, as they focus on Mayu painting her sister’s lips while her decapitated head rests in her lap. Nothing like a disturbing visual moment to ruin an entire evening.

While Persona 5 features several distressing outcomes for failing to stop its array of villains, the ending you face for not taking down the local crime lord Kaneshiro is particularly stomach-turning. Upon meeting him, Kaneshiro makes disturbing references to trafficking young girls and dehumanizes both Makoto and Ann by calling them 'goods,' underscoring his depravity. There was no way to warm you guys up to this, so I’m just gonna keep going. If you fail to stop him, Makoto is kidnapped, drugged, and coerced into prostitution before being rescued by the police. During her drugged state, she repeatedly says 'Joker,' which leads the authorities straight to you, ending in you being unjustly shot and killed. Nobody wins.

In the final chapter of F.E.A.R 2, ‘Climax’, protagonist Michael Beckett finds himself trapped inside a psychic amplifier machine with the antagonist, Alma. The plan is for Beckett to use his enhanced psychic abilities to defeat her. However, things go awry, and Beckett starts experiencing a series of vivid and disturbing hallucinations. Most alarmingly, he repeatedly sees and feels Alma engaging in non-consensual sex with him, which seems distressingly real. This is bad enough, but after breaking free from his delirium and escaping the machine, Beckett finds the world around him in flames and discovers that Alma is pregnant. As he approaches her and places his hand on her stomach, a child's voice saying "Mommy" is heard before the screen fades to black. What. The. F***.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop talking about this game, because it is so narratively disturbing that it will never leave my brain. The story centers on AM, a supercomputer that has exterminated humanity except for five survivors, whom it keeps alive and tortures for eternity. AM reveals to these captives that there are 750 humans in cryosleep, and they must prove humanity's worth or the frozen individuals will be destroyed. If they fail, the final character you control murders the other four survivors before attempting suicide. However, AM transforms this character into a gelatinous form incapable of self-harm. The character is condemned to exist in this state forever, and if being on the verge of suicide for eternity isn’t bad enough, AM awakens the 750 sleeping cryopatients to torment him as well.

If you don’t build a strong enough bond with Hewie before the final chapter of Haunting Ground, he will not come to rescue Fiona from Riccardo, leading to the infamous Ending D. In this ending, Fiona wakes up trapped inside a glass case, with Riccardo on the outside. He taunts her, claiming that she is now his possession and will soon bear his child despite her resistance. The scene then jumps forward to show Fiona sitting in a large armchair, now heavily pregnant. Riccardo enters and tenderly touches her face, and Fiona forces a smile and starts to laugh, seemingly resigned to her fate of servitude and emotionally shutting down. Dark. Really dark.

Although it’s hard for some to wrap their heads around the metaphors of Alan Wake's ending, the actual clear narrative ending is disturbing regardless. At the end of Alan Wake, the protagonist, Alan Wake, confronts the darkness that has taken over his wife, Alice. He discovers that he has been trapped in a nightmarish parallel world, and the only way to free Alice and escape is to confront the darkness directly. Alan sacrifices himself, allowing the darkness to consume him, which in turn destroys the malevolent force and saves Alice. In the final scenes, Alice is seen safe and sound, while Alan remains trapped in the dark realm, his fate left uncertain as he continues to write his story, implying he may still be battling the darkness.

If you haven’t played Silent Hill 2, and you’re looking forward to trying out the remake, skip this entry, because this ending is wild, AND famous. After protagonist James comes to Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his wife who had died of cancer, you spend your entire journey trying to get to the bottom of this letter. It is discovered that James' wife, Mary, while suffering from her terminal illness, was smothered by James who aimed to end her suffering and his own torment. This shocking revelation about Mary's death challenges players' expectations and forces them to grapple with the moral complexities of the story. It’s so infamous that people are still talking about this ending to this day.

You can’t talk about disturbing endings in games without giving Bethesda their praise for the FEV ending in their groundbreaking game, Fallout 3. In this ending, the player chooses to activate the FEV-based purifier at the Jefferson Memorial. This decision results in a catastrophic release of the virus, which has the potential to radically alter human evolution. The player, who may have been exposed to radiation, ensures the purifier's activation but ultimately sacrifices themself in the process. The ending shows the resulting chaos as the FEV contaminates the wasteland, potentially leading to a new, mutated species and a grim future for humanity. Ending an already decimated humanity is dark as hell, and continues to be an option in most Bethesda games.

The ending that shook us to our cores, and solidified The Last of Us as one of the greatest games of all time. After spending the entire game trying to deliver Ellie to The Fireflies, Joel learns that they plan to kill her in order to extract samples from her brain to attempt to create a cure from her immunity. Unwilling to let them sacrifice Ellie, he goes on a violent rampage through the Fireflies' hospital, killing anyone who obstructs him. He ultimately kills the doctors to rescue Ellie. He also guns down Marlene, who had originally saved Ellie and been somewhat of a caretaker to her. This dark turn takes autonomy away from Ellie, who would have likely wanted to die for humanity. After lying to her about what happened, we as the player are left with a truly awful feeling in our gut, even though both our protagonists made it out alive. It’s complicated, and undeniably disturbing.