Games With Endings That Stay With You

Winning here means saying goodbye. You're the Reader, an exile cast into a purgatory called the Downside and taken in by a wagon of outcasts because you can read the rules of the Rites: three-a-side contests in which each team tries to carry a glowing orb into the other side's fire, a bit like mystical basketball. Win a Liberation Rite and one of your exiles goes home free, so your best players are the ones you're most tempted to keep. Lose, and the story carries on anyway. Over around ten hours, who you sent away and who you kept becomes a story that's yours alone.

A voice called Elohim gives you the run of his sunlit gardens and forbids exactly one thing: climbing the tower. You wake as a robot among ancient ruins and solve laser-and-jammer puzzles in first person, until a computer terminal starts debating philosophy with you and refuses to play fair. Writers Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes turn the choice between obedience and doubt into something you act on with your own hands. Later puzzles get properly hard, so it suits people who enjoy being stuck for a while; the main game alone runs around 15 hours. Reawakened is Croteam's 2025 remake, adding the Road to Gehenna expansion and a new chapter, In the Beginning.

Players are still trading theories about its final stretch, so read nothing about it before you play. A boy slips through a dark forest into a vast, grim facility, hiding from guards and dogs, and Playdead's wordless puzzle platformer never stops to explain why. You run, hide, push and pull; the puzzles are clever but rarely hold you up for long, and the whole thing takes three or four hours. Deaths are sudden and graphic. It won the 2017 BAFTA for Narrative without a line of dialogue.

You never see her, yet by the last box you know her better than most game heroes. Unpacking is a relaxed puzzle game about taking things out of boxes: across eight moves between 1997 and 2018, you find a place for one woman's belongings in each new home and learn her from what she keeps, what she outgrows and what won't fit. In a boyfriend's flat, the only place left for her diploma is under the bed. There's no timer or score, and it lasts around four hours. Witch Beam's game won the 2022 BAFTA for Narrative, and its final move speaks the same language of objects.