Games With Endings That Stay With You

Its ending is earned with nothing but what you've understood. There are no upgrades, levels or gear: the sun explodes 22 minutes into every loop, you wake by the same campfire, and only knowledge survives, kept in your ship's log. You fly a rickety ship between small handmade planets, reading the ruins of a vanished people, and the final journey lands hardest on players who followed their own hunches rather than a guide, so stay off forums. Expect fiddly piloting and the odd loop lost to a careless landing. The base game tells a complete story; the Echoes of the Eye expansion can wait.

A family history told through its deaths, and more playful than that sounds. Edith returns to the Finch house, a crooked tower of sealed bedrooms on an island off Washington state, and each room opens one relative's last day as a short playable story with its own style and controls. The standout has your right hand guiding fish under a cannery guillotine while your left steers a daydream that slowly takes over the screen. There's no challenge to speak of and children are among the dead, but at around two hours it's the easiest single-evening pick here, and its closing minutes show why every room was worth opening.

Your own blinks are the controller. A webcam watches your face as a ferryman draws out your life story, and every blink jumps the tale forward, often just as a scene you wanted to linger in gets good. Staying in a moment means fighting your body, and by the last chapters that struggle is the whole point. It runs about 90 minutes, so play it in one sitting with the lights low and nobody talking to you. There's a mouse-click option if you have no webcam, but it takes away the risk that makes the game work.

One gamepad, two brothers: the left stick and trigger move the older boy, the right stick and trigger the younger, and every puzzle on their journey to find a cure for their dying father needs both. For the first half-hour it feels like patting your head and rubbing your stomach; then it becomes second nature, and the story makes more of that than you'd expect. It takes about three hours, the difficulty is gentle, and a keyboard misses the point entirely. This entry is Starbreeze's 2013 original, directed by Josef Fares, rather than the 2024 remake.

The monsters are the least frightening thing in Soma. Simon Jarrett sits down for a brain scan in Toronto and comes round in PATHOS-II, a half-flooded research station at the bottom of the Atlantic, and Frictional Games, the studio behind Amnesia, uses its dark corridors and hiding to press one question about what makes you you until there's nowhere left to look away. If hide-and-seek horror is what's stopping you, Safe Mode, added in 2017, stops the creatures attacking and leaves the story untouched. Allow around ten hours.

Most choice games make you live with a bad call. This one gives Max Caulfield, a photography student back in her Oregon hometown, the power to rewind time, so you redo every awkward conversation until it comes out right, and the final episode asks what that habit is worth. At its centre is her rekindled friendship with Chloe, the best friend she drifted away from, and the story takes in bullying, suicide and abuse. Some of the teenage slang has aged badly; the friendship hasn't. Remastered collects all five episodes, around 15 hours in all.

'Clementine will remember that.' The line flashes in the corner after a lie or a kindness, and it turns every conversation into something you're teaching an eight-year-old. Lee Everett is being driven to prison when the dead rise, and soon he has taken in Clementine, whose babysitter has turned. Telltale's five-episode 2012 adventure is mostly talking, with dialogue choices on a timer, a few frantic fights and decisions about who to save. The branching is shallower than those prompts suggest, and it hardly matters: what you really shape is how carefully you speak to a child, and the final episode is where that lands. Ten to twelve hours.

The first time the credits roll, you've seen roughly a third of the story. You play 2B, a combat android sent to win back an Earth overrun by machines for the humans who fled to the Moon, and PlatinumGames supplies fast, flashy action. A second playthrough retells events through another android's eyes, the third moves into entirely new chapters, and the five main endings, A to E, are spread across them; the other 21 letters are jokes you trip over by doing something daft. It asks 30 hours or more, and the open world and side quests are thin in places. Keep going to E: everything is built towards it.

Every fight can end without anyone dying, and the game watches how you treat its monsters more closely than any RPG has a right to. A child falls into the Underground, a kingdom of monsters sealed beneath a mountain, and battles are bullet-hell dodging in which mercy, flirting and patience all count as moves. Toby Fox's writing is funny first and moving when you least expect it, over about six hours. Which ending you reach depends on what you did, and for the warmest, go True Pacifist: spare everyone, befriend whoever lets you, and follow the extra steps the game hints at after a Neutral ending.

It greets you by your computer's username, and that's only the first time it reaches outside its own window. Niko, a cat-like child, wakes in a world whose sun has gone out and must carry a glowing lightbulb to the top of a tower, while you play the person watching over them, and Niko knows you're there. Some puzzles are solved on your actual desktop, so play the original 2016 PC release rather than World Machine Edition, which recreates that desktop inside the game. The first run takes about five hours and isn't the whole story: carry on into Solstice, and if you can't see how, a spoiler-free hint is no shame.

The hardest climb here is the one inside Madeline's head. She has set out to scale Celeste Mountain, and a part of her that sounds a lot like anxiety argues with her all the way up, while you handle precise, punishing jumps that reset in an instant when you miss. A loading screen tells you to be proud of your death count, and the game means it. The main story ends at the summit after around eight hours; the brutal Farewell chapter is an epilogue for much later. If the platforming is too much, Assist Mode slows the game or makes you invincible without dulling the payoff.

Nothing in Gris can kill you, which leaves you free to look. A girl wakes in the hand of a crumbling statue, loses her voice and falls into a world drained of colour, and this wordless platformer has you bring it back one hue at a time, through Conrad Roset's hand-painted watercolours and Berlinist's score. The puzzles are light and the pace unhurried, so anyone after a challenge will be restless well before the closing stretch, which says everything it needs to without a line of text. Three or four hours, ideally in one or two sittings.

The companion who matters most here is a stranger you'll never speak to. A robed figure walks across a desert towards a glowing mountain, and somewhere on the dunes another figure may join you: a real player, whose name stays hidden until the credits. Neither of you can type or talk, only sing a musical chime, and neither can harm the other. Two to three hours of crossing sand and snow side by side is enough to make that nameless person matter by the summit, so play online; alone it is still beautiful, but much lonelier.

Every passenger you grow fond of will, sooner or later, be ready to leave. You play Stella, the new ferrymaster to the dead, sailing a boat of spirits between islands: you farm, fish, cook each passenger's favourite meal, build them a cabin and hug them, with an actual hug button, until each is ready to move on. Thunder Lotus calls it a cosy management game about dying, which is accurate and still undersells it. It takes 25 hours or more and the chores can drag mid-game, but that routine is what the final voyage is made of, so let it settle in.

It's very funny right up until it isn't. Mae Borowski, twenty and newly dropped out of college, comes home to Possum Springs, a town whose jobs left before she did, and you spend your days wandering, jumping across rooftops, playing bass with the band and talking to old friends. Everyone is an animal; Mae is a cat. Who you spend each evening with, Bea or Gregg, changes which scenes you see. There's little challenge and the middle meanders, but its honesty about mental health is rare, and it suits anyone who has moved back home and found it changed. About nine hours.

Its first players spent seven years reaching the end: Act I came out in January 2013 and Act V in January 2020. Conway, a delivery driver for an antiques shop, is looking for an address that doesn't seem to exist, and the only way there is the Zero, a hidden highway beneath Kentucky. It's a point-and-click adventure in which you mostly choose what people say, drifting further into magical realism with every stray he picks up. There are almost no puzzles, so come for the writing and the mood. Play a complete edition with all five acts and the interludes; the last act is closer to theatre than a finale.

The whole game rests on a voice on a walkie-talkie. It's 1989, and Henry has taken a summer job as a fire lookout in Wyoming's Shoshone National Forest to escape a life he can't fix. His only company is Delilah, his supervisor on the radio, and Cissy Jones won a BAFTA for making her the most real thing in the forest. You hike, read a paper map and choose what to tell her. It lasts about four hours, and the ending still divides people. To me it's honest about what running away can buy you, and that honesty is why it stays.

Failure often gives you the best scenes. You wake in a wrecked hostel room with no memory, a police detective with a murder to solve and 24 skills that speak up in your head, argue with each other and sometimes lie. There's almost no combat: you talk, think and roll dice, and a failed roll tends to open something stranger than success would, so let it stand rather than reloading. The Final Cut adds full voice acting, with Lenval Brown performing the narrator and every skill. Expect a lot of reading over 20 hours or more; the closing conversations weigh up who you've been without pretending anything is solved.

Arthur Morgan keeps a journal, and you can read a hardened outlaw's handwriting working through doubts he won't say aloud. It's 1899, a robbery has gone wrong, and Arthur, an enforcer for Dutch van der Linde's gang, is on the run with the only family he has. Rockstar's open-world western makes you live with them, hunting for the camp, paying debts and keeping promises, for around fifty hours before the last chapters cash it all in, and Roger Clark, who won Best Performance at The Game Awards 2018 for the role, carries the weight. The pace is deliberately slow and the controls heavy, which loses some players early. Play the two-part epilogue too; it belongs to that ending.

Few endings have kept players arguing for as long as this one. Twenty years after a fungal outbreak wrecked America, Joel, a smuggler in Boston's quarantine zone, is hired to get a fourteen-year-old called Ellie out of the city. Naughty Dog alternates tense stealth, scavenging and brutal gunfights with quieter stretches of the two of them talking, and those quiet stretches are what the ending draws on. It's violent and often bleak, and runs around 15 hours. Part I is the 2022 remake: the 2013 story intact, everything around it rebuilt, with accessibility options including audio description for cutscenes.

James Sunderland drives to Silent Hill because his wife has written asking him to meet her there. She died three years ago. Go in knowing nothing more. This is survival horror at its most oppressive, with fog, scarce ammunition and long, grim fights, and the ending you get comes from the game quietly watching how you play rather than from any menu choice. Bloober Team's 2024 remake, scored again by Akira Yamaoka, keeps all of that. A first run takes 16 hours or so, so it suits patient horror fans more than anyone curious about the story alone.

Final Fantasy X begins near its own end, with its hero by a campfire asking you to listen to his story because this may be the last chance, and everything after is the road back to that fire. Tidus, a star of the underwater sport blitzball, is torn from his glittering city by a vast monster called Sin and stranded in Spira, where he joins a young summoner's pilgrimage to defeat it. It's a turn-based RPG and the first main Final Fantasy with voice acting, some of it famously stiff early on. Give it the 40 hours or more it asks; by the finale, the party and the score do the heavy lifting. The HD Remaster is the easy way to play it now.

A narrator comments on almost everything you do, falling off the edge of the world included, and by the final choices you'll care what he makes of yours. The Kid wakes to a world shattered by the Calamity, the ground assembling under his feet as he runs, and heads for the Bastion, a refuge where survivors were meant to gather. Supergiant's first game is a compact action RPG with weapons worth mixing and shrine idols that toughen enemies for bigger rewards when you want a harder fight. Logan Cunningham's narration is what you'll remember. It takes around six hours.

Its best button has no tactical use: press it and Red hums along to Darren Korb's score. She's a singer in the city of Cloudbank whose voice has been stolen, and all she has left is a strange sword, the Transistor, which speaks in a man's voice and does the talking for both of them. Supergiant's action RPG lets you freeze time to plan each attack, then watch it play out, and swapping its abilities around rewards experiment. It takes about six hours. A woman, a voice and a song are what the last stretch is built on.