10 Most Powerful Game Endings

Table of Contents

• 10 Most Powerful Game Endings
• "Would you kindly...?" - BioShock
• "And if the truth is undeniable, you create your own." - Spec Ops: The Line
• "Keep your hair short" – The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series - Season One
• "The price you pay may be heavy indeed" - Shadow of the Colossus
• You don't send a man to do a woman's job... - Metroid
• My name is Snake, Snake... uh, wait a second... - Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
• "She radiated fury" - Braid
• "I held John's hand while he was drowning" - Heavy Rain
• Join me, on... whichever side of the Force! - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

"And if the truth is undeniable, you create your own." - Spec Ops: The Line

The revelations from BioShock's ending may not seem very shocking when we compare them with the finale of five years older Spec Ops: The Line. What first looked like a rather straightforward TPP action shooter with soldiers in the lead role, changed with time into Silent Hill 2 for G.I. Joes. After the game was over, one could expect one heck of a moral hangover, especially since the scriptwriters blew up the fourth wall and accused the player directly of having commited the acts performed by Walker - the game's main protagonist.

And we have to admit that there was something to be accused of. During the course of the game, we contributed to a genocide of civilians and the death of our teammates. All in the name of greater good, a special mission, to eliminate once and for all a rogue soldier, Colonel John Konrad, who is said to have created his little private kingdom in the city of Dubai, now plunged into chaos. In the end, however, it turned out that Konrad committed suicide about two weeks before the events we witnessed.

Everything that drove Walker to push forward, kill, make tough calls, and finally commit crimes just to complete the mission, was just a hallucination. His mind, beginning to drown in the surrounding madness, invented Konrad's words and deeds to justify increasingly brutal atrocities. It wasn't until the end that we really started to understand the lines that were displayed on loading screens ("Wake up! This is your fault"). Konrad's vision sums it all up with a blunt fact: "Nothing would happen if you'd stopped" - if Walker had followed his original orders: take a look at the city and return. We, however, like every other shooter player before us, grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger. This time only because WE wanted to do it.

1. More about Spec Ops: The Line