We all know many games with incredible endings, fanfare, drama, explosions, and the like. But what about the opposite? What about those times when the controller’s still warm, snack isn’t even finished and bam, credits? Some are budget casualties, some are artistic choices, but they’re all pulling the ultimate Irish goodbye.
Getting out to the parking lot before the show’s over to beat traffic. Hi folks, it’s Zaid and today on Aura Riot, 10 games that just abruptly ended.
10: Rage
Not a lot of people thinking about Rage these days, but for at least a while this game was actually highly anticipated. It was id Software’s big return after spending most of the 2000s MIA and had John Goodman as a starring role. What more could you want?
I guess mega textures? That was a new technology. But that all ended up being more trouble than it was worth. It was all actually a big reason why development on Rage was so troubled and a big contributing factor on why the final game that got released in 2011 just felt undercooked.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Rage had really cool tech, had some impressive enemy AI and the aforementioned mega textures, but the game was just, it was just boring a lot of the time. There’s highlights, for sure, but overall, this just isn’t one of its best. I mean, they’ve never been great at endings. Do you remember Doom Two’s Icon of Sin or Quake’s final boss? Kind of lame conclusions to otherwise legendary games and Rage is not a legendary game, so it only follows that the conclusion is even more disappointing. And yes, it is.
In fact, it’s more disappointing than anyone could have anticipated. This thing was shocking back in 2011. When the credits started rolling, I was like, is this a joke? Like this is a parody, like the real thing’s about to happen? It genuinely feels like a skit where rolling the credits at an anti-climactic time is the funny gimmick of the skit. But we were not watching SNL, we were playing Rage and also I’m giving SNL a little more credit than maybe it’s due.
Where you’re at when you’re coming up on the ending seems like it’s gonna be an exciting change of scenery. Like you’ve met up with the resistance, you’re infiltrating the bad guys, high tech city called Capital Prime, and prior it’s just been a lot of dusty and general post apocalyptic stuff. So cool, right? Now you’re going to this high tech city run by essentially the enclave from Fallout. Seems like the game is building things up for a grand finale when you’re fighting a full scale war through the streets of Capital Prime.
The first step of the plan is to take down the authority by activating all the ARC satellites to call them down to form an army. It’s a good starting mission to kick off the game’s final act. You’re running around the outer wall of the city, you get a brief glimpse of it, a tease of what’s to come. The mission’s not really anything special so far, running down corridors, fighting slightly modified versions of the mutants you’ve had to deal with already, but things will certainly get more interesting when you actually reach the streets.
So you activate the satellite, step one complete, time to kick things into high gear, right? Wrong, that’s the end of the game. You hit a button in a tech base that’s not even really in the city and it’s over.
That’s it, folks, no final boss, no big set pieces or story resolution, it just stops. It is such a disappointing resolution. It’s so utterly unsatisfying. I mean, I don’t even really know what to say beyond it actually legitimately just stops. Like why show us this cool stuff in the distance? Like we’re gonna go there when we’re not.
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9: Alien Rogue Incursion
This game just threw out, but I wanted to toss it in the mix, just to show that modern games pull this same stuff. It’s not just older games. On average, I’d say modern games tend to put a little more work into their finale. They try to end on a big satisfying note a lot of the time, rather than just fizzle out like a lot of games from previous generations often did.
Certainly not saying that newer games are better in general, it’s just they do try to stick the landing even if they fall flat for other reasons. With that said, though, modern games do this still. Alien Rogue Incursion is a modern game that just kind of stops. They tried to warn us by slapping a big part one on the game’s store page, but even knowing that the game isn’t the complete Alien Rogue Incursion, it still feels like the ending comes out of nowhere.
The plot of the game revolves around the usual alien stuff, exploring a destroyed outpost full of aliens.
But so much is left unresolved, feeling like part one is less like a complete package in its own right and actually just half a game that got separated off and released for whatever reason. Nothing about the plot gets resolved, nothing.
It stops after you manage to get the alien out of your chest, which fine, good, is a cut scene heavily inspired by that one scene from Prometheus, then you randomly get a call from a guy, the guy you came to look for, in fact. They open up a secret elevator for you and let you ride it down, you get to the bottom, a synth starts going nuts and it cuts to black. That’s the ending. Nothing’s resolved.
You don’t really explore the alien nest and all the secret labs are apparently gonna be in part two, whenever that actually comes out.
I do hope that when part two comes out, they release it as just kind of a full game, where if you own part one and buy part two, it becomes one game and also you have the option to just buy the whole game, if you previously didn’t buy part one. I feel like that would just work a lot better.
8: Crysis
The 2007 FPS that was just cutting edge at the time, but the actual game ended up feeling a little more like a tech demo than a fully fleshed out game. The ending is especially jarring with how scripted and exposition heavy it is. The final mission feels like one of those interstitial levels that sets up the final run of missions, but for whatever reason, it’s not the setup, it is the finale.
Like it’s right out of Independence Day. The admiral fires nukes at the aliens, it doesn’t work. Cue everyone having to evacuate the aircraft carrier. You fight off an alien warship, you get on an escape chopper, but of course, instead of escaping, you head back to the island and stop the aliens once and for all.
Everything about this cut scene suggests it’s all set up for the end game, but instead of wrapping the game up with the standard hail Mary attack at the heart of the enemy, the game just ends, pretends like it’s supposed to be some exciting cliffhanger.
I mean, in a way, I’m sure a lot of people were glad the game stopped there for gameplay reasons, fighting the aliens is not exactly interesting. It’s certainly less interesting than the North Korean soldiers you were taking on at the start of the game.
But as far as a satisfying narrative goes, this is not one and to make matters worse, it barely even gets followed up. Crysis Two might as well be a soft reboot considering how different it is, the aliens look and function completely differently. The settings, I mean it’s not even not the same, it’s just entirely new. It’s only vaguely related to the first game. So the cliffhanger doesn’t really get resolved.
7: Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
In this game’s case, the abrupt ending is at least partly justified by the choice of the game’s aesthetics and storytelling. The whole thing plays out like some kind of documentary with a gritty handheld camera style. It’s meant to evoke handheld footage. Of course, the actual plot is right out of an action movie, but the presentation is meant to be realistic.
Recording just starts in the middle of the action and stops when it’s over. Real life doesn’t have satisfying conclusions, but they could have ended the game with something instead of nothing. Something, bow on the whole thing, you know? Instead it just stops.
These two miserable, ugly guys go on a rampage through the Hong Kong underworld, barely survive, spend a mission bare ass naked for reasons. Then the final mission, they run around an airport, hijack an airplane and that’s it. Heading off to be naked in the sky, I don’t know. And they have clothes on at this point, but there’s no guarantee they’re keeping them. They’ve gotten a taste of nature.
The big confrontation with the other slightly worse bad guys is concluded. And yeah, a lot of the previously established plot points are never resolved, but that’s just life, man. In real life you don’t get everything wrapped up in a tight little package. You’re naked, running around with nothing wrapped up, right? Insert package joke.
I get the idea, but it’s still a really unsatisfying ending. The epic conclusion is that you run across a tarmac while some dogs chase you. So like not that different from what mailmen deal with while they deliver mail except on a tarmac. That’s the final gameplay challenge, sprinting across an empty field. It’s one of those endings that makes you go, what, is that it? Because it just doesn’t make much sense as a conclusion for a video game.
Maybe a movie could make something like this work, but video games need to escalate in challenge and complexity and this game just kind of gives you a damp squib of a final mission and that’s that.
6: Clive Barker’s Jericho
This game is a perfect example of a generic mid-2000s sludge game. It’s full of annoying, overly aggressive characters, tons of dark brown hallways, an unnecessary amount of lore to try and liven up what is otherwise a completely forgettable FPS.
There is at least one thing memorable about it and it’s the way you can jump between squad members and take direct control over them. That’s an innovation, but this game barely ever does anything interesting with it. It’s a playable game, but man, is it aggressively ugly.
Has to be one of the worst, most inconclusive nothings of an ending in any game. The setup is standard enough. There’s this whole convoluted plot line here, but basically you have to seal away a being known as the firstborn. Your squad decides to try to kill it instead. You go through a portal and take it on in an underwhelming boss battle.
Instead the firstborn, the ultimate evil that’s been set up the entire game, it’s a baby. It’s not a demon baby either, it’s just a baby. It’s not even a big baby. You defeat it, duh. But then the game’s actual bad guy swoops in and saves the baby, which is not a sentence I expected to ever say when it comes to anything.
I mean, literally nothing sounds like it should end that way. But that’s what happens in Clive Barker’s Jericho, the evil villain swoops in to save a baby from our gang of heroic baby killers.
I don’t know what’s happening at all at this point. I had completely forgotten about this game. But man, going back through it, it’s such a head scratcher. Everything goes bad. The surviving heroes dive into some water, swim to safety, but that’s it. That’s all that happens. The game stops at that point.
They don’t even try to build it up like a cliffhanger, it’s just a bunch of swimming. You emerge and then end credits. There’s no post credit stinger to give you some kind of tease as to what is supposed to happen. Just a non-ending.
And while the developers of the game, Mercury Steam, the same ones who went on to make the absolute banger, Metroid Dread, they’re still around, but I don’t think anybody’s chomping at the bit to get a new Jericho game. So it’s not like this cliffhanger, which is even… It’s barely a cliffhanger, but it’s not gonna get followed up on.
5: Metal Gear Solid V
You can’t have a list of games that just stop without mentioning Metal Gear Solid V. This game is famously unfinished. Entire characters and storylines never get resolved in any kind of satisfactory way. The game does have an ending, but the second act promises so much more. But eh, obviously we’re talking about it so it never really materializes.
Yes, there are standout moments where you have to deal with Mother Base getting infected with a potentially world destroying virus.
But it feels a bit like a non-sequitur because they have this big epic dark mission that never really gets followed up on in any meaningful way. Part two of MGS5 is mostly replaying old missions with repurposed stuff that’s changed to be slightly new. You do that for a while and then out of nowhere you drop into a new version of the game’s starting mission, which plays out exactly the same and it’s just as long and drawn out as the first, only now there’s a few extra scenes tacked on and they reveal the big controversial twist. You know, the big one.
And then roll credits. And that’s the ending of the game. Some random repeat of the first mission that appeared just because. And it’s not even the real end because a few more missions unlock after this one, but those missions don’t reveal anything new. There’s no more story or important stuff after this. The game just literally stops a few missions after the truth.
It was infamously going to be a mission 51, that was cut from the game that would’ve at least offered some kind of resolution to the plot, but that’s not there. So there’s nothing. For a series so well known for its dramatic, some might say overdramatic storytelling style and cut scenes, it’s pretty jarring that the grand finale of the entire saga is so inconclusive.
You can tell Kojima must have really been unsatisfied with how MGS5 ended because it feels like the conclusions to both Death Stranding and Death Stranding Two, they kind of feel like a big do over. Like say what you want about those games, they are confusing, but they are at least trying to make those endings impactful. And I think that’s in reaction to Metal Gear Solid V.
4: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
The ending to Mankind Divided feels like the halfway point of the game because it was. The game’s main writer straight up said that because of production issues, the second half of the game was cut. The mission that was supposed to be the midpoint of the game is the final mission. And it’s blatantly obvious to anyone who’s ever played the game, that this is not the intended place the game was supposed to end.
If you don’t remember the plot of Mankind Divided primarily revolves around hunting down an augmented human terrorist. That’s, I mean, combined with this big conspiracy story, it’s pretty obvious somebody else is pulling the strings and in any normal game defeating him would lead you down the path to finding the true bad guy who’s behind all of it.
This setup happens in countless games, countless stories, and it is used this much because it is an effective plot point. Like there are only seven different types of stories in existence. This is one way to make one of those types of stories really land.
It also has a benefit for the mechanics of a game, allowing for different distinct parts. Like you could divide it up into hubs or eras, like maybe a bomb hits in the middle of the city and it’s completely changed for the second half of the game. The map is a completely different place with completely different stuff happening on it. Fires, rubble, that kind of stuff. Or maybe they take place in different parts of the planet.
Obviously Mankind Divided only has one hub area. It was intended to have two. And that’s exactly how Human Revolution did it and it made sense. Another thing that made it obvious is that this was a really short game, not just for a Deus Ex game, but for a shooter in general. There’s not enough there for it to be a full game, which sucks because if the game had gotten the gestation time, if the team was given the time, they probably would’ve made one of the best Deus Ex games.
What is in this game is very good, but the unnecessary tacked on multiplayer and ultimately threadbare plot that doesn’t get fully resolved, just killed enthusiasm for the franchise.
3: Far Cry 4
The developers just got a little too cute for their own good with this one. I get what they were trying to do by making the evil choice or whatever intentionally unsatisfying, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
So if you don’t know or don’t remember the ending of Far Cry 4 actually does feel incomplete. But it’s not one of those situations where the developers quickly ran out of time and resources and were forced to just ship what they had. In the case of Far Cry 4, it was an intentional choice.
See, after you invade the evil Pagan Min’s stronghold at the end of the game, he doesn’t put up a fight. Instead he offers you a choice. You can either kill him right now or he’ll take you to the top of the mountain where you can spread your mom’s ashes, which is the whole reason you came to the country in the first place.
Now, Pagan Min is your standard issue psychotic Far Cry bad guy, so I wouldn’t blame anyone for just wanting to kill him. Instead of having to listen to more of his Joker wannabe shtick, but that’s the bad ending. If you do just shoot him, there’s no conclusion. You just shoot him. You fire the gun and that’s the credits, that’s the ending.
Which would be kind of funny if you could at least go back and reload your save to see what happens if you let him live except for it overwrites your save. If you want to see the actual ending where something, you know, happens, you have to replay the game all over again. It’s total bullshit but you do have to give it to the devs. They really did get us with this one.
Just as you use those ashes as an excuse to do whatever you want to do. Goddamn if it isn’t fun.
The actual ending isn’t much more satisfying and it sucks that after all the trouble you went through to get there, Pagan just gets away on a helicopter at the end. At least they let you sneak a rocket launcher with you so you can possibly have your cake and eat it too, but they really make you work for it.
2: Cheetahmen II
Getting to the bottom of the barrel. There are a lot of old NES and SNES games that didn’t really have endings, let alone satisfying ones. For every Final Fantasy Six there was 100 NES Ghostbusters. A lot of the time it’s just expected that the game just sort of stopped after you beat the final boss. That was that.
This game, which is an unpublished sequel to the infamously made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ripoff originally packed with Action 52, it doesn’t even bother ending abruptly at the end, it ends in the middle of the game.
Technically, it is a complete game that can be played but only through hacking, because if you try to play this thing normally, it always locks up at the end of level four. There are six total levels in the game. It literally cannot be completed through normal means.
So either way, there’s no actual ending of the game, there’s no ending cut scene, even if you do skip to level six, just sort of stops one way or the other, but if you’re playing normally, there’s no way to progress past the level four boss. It’s not because this guy’s impossibly hard, because once you do kill him, the game just doesn’t progress. You’re stuck on that screen forever. That’s it.
Game’s a broken mess, that never released, but it’s inexplicably somehow a finished game. Like there were physical versions of this produced. Like people found a pallet of these things in a Florida warehouse back in 1996. So it’s not just some random alpha prototype, it’s a full game and it still soft locks on level four no matter what.
1: Saga Frontier – Blue’s Scenario
It’s one of those weird games made during Square’s experimental phase in the PS1. It’s a fascinatingly weird RPG that’s super ambitious, it has seven distinct scenarios, or at least in the original version. The remaster added an eighth one. But while there’s a lot of ideas in the game, you can really tell that they were struggling to put it all together.
Some of these scenarios are really rushed. They have out of nowhere final boss fights that are just bafflingly weird. The final boss of Blue’s Scenario actually isn’t one of them.
The thing that makes this particular final battle so bizarre is that it just stops. You do a certain amount of damage to the guy in the game, freezes out of nowhere and slowly fades to black. Why is this happening? Like is this a glitch? I mean, it looks like a glitch. It’s so sudden and out of nowhere. I can’t think of any other game where this happens.
You’re fighting the guy like any other RPG boss and then it stops and says “The End.” You know, like everything’s been resolved. Not like even a trick or a meta thing. That’s supposed to be the end.
The developer would later go on to explain that this apparently is meant to illustrate that Blue is forever locked in combat with this guy for all eternity. But it is possible to say that or do something that implies that rather than the words “The End,” because it looks like the game bugs out. Like it’s probably one of the most bafflingly abrupt endings I’ve ever seen in a game.
Usually if there’s a final boss, they at least let you finish killing them before speeding through the unsatisfying conclusion, but you don’t even get that.
Anyway, that’s all for today. Leave us a comment, let us know what you think. And as always, we thank you very much for reading this blog. I’m Zaid. We’ll see you next time right here on Aura Riot.