Cliffhanger Game Endings We Still Don't Have Answers To

There may be nothing more unsatisfying than coming to the end of a long journey and finding that there's no closure waiting for you in the final moments of a story. Sadly, that happens quite often in the world of video games. 

There are multiple different reasons why we may miss out on the concluding chapter of a game series. Sometimes the developers behind these games go under, sometimes sales are too low to justify continuing a storyline, and sometimes these games are just stuck in plain ol' development hell, never seeing the light of day despite critical praise and a rabid fanbase. For one reason or another, the following games ended on cliffhangers and have yet to see their proper conclusions. That's not to say that they never will, but for many of these, it certainly seems very unlikely.

Beware of spoilers for the plots and endings of the following video games.

Let's just get this one out of the way up top. Though the original plan was to release the continuing Half-Life saga as a trilogy of episodic installments, it has been over a decade since we received the last update to the Half-Life franchise. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 ended with Alyx, one of the story's lead characters, holding her father's lifeless body and sobbing. Meanwhile, the invading extra-dimensional alien race known as the Combine had gained enough information to possibly turn the tide of the battle in their favor.

In 2017, series writer Marc Laidlaw gave fans an unofficial idea of how the series would have ended, posting a short story featuring thinly veiled versions of Half-Life's characters. However, while this glorified fan fiction served as something of a salve for the sting of not getting Half-Life 3, it still doesn't quite compare to being able to see the story through to its conclusion in the way Valve originally intended. 

While the Mega Man Legends spinoff series was known for having more in-depth storylines than the main series, that turned out to be a bit of a double-edged sword when Legends came to an abrupt end. Mega Man Legends 2 left several plot threads unresolved, the most pressing of which is the fact that our hero was left stranded on the moon with no way to get home. 

Though a sequel was announced around a decade later for the Nintendo DS, Capcom eventually decided not to go through with it. Since then, fans have continued to clamor for some kind of resolution to the Legends storyline, with some taking it upon themselves to create their own story. Legends fan group Get Me Off the Moon ran a fun contest for fans to present their version of how Mega Man made it back home. Sadly, we will probably never see an official continuation of this story.

Resident Evil Gaiden is something of an oddity in the zombie-battling franchise. Released on the Game Boy Color, this game broke the usual gameplay formulas of the series by presenting its story as a mix of top-down adventure and first-person action. The plot followed recurring Resident Evil protagonist Leon Kennedy as he investigated the presence of a bio-organic weapon on a luxury cruise liner. 

While fighting off the usual walking dead of the series, Leon came to learn that the creature he was hunting was a shape-shifter with green blood. Following several close calls with the monster, Leon and a few survivors made it off the cruise liner, having apparently killed the bio-organic weapon created by the Umbrella Corporation. However, the game's final shot showed Leon bleeding green blood, implying that he'd been replaced by the shapeshifter. 

Considering the fact that we never got a sequel to Gaiden and Leon turned up very much human a few years later in Resident Evil 4, it's safe to assume that we'll never see what happened next in this story. These days, it's been accepted that the events of Gaiden are not canonical to the series.

As expected from a series with its title, The Darkness didn't shy away from some pretty gnarly stuff. Our protagonist was a hitman named Jackie Estacado, who found himself host to a demonic entity that granted him supernatural powers. Jackie's girlfriend Jenny was killed during the events of the first game, which fueled much of his obsession going into the sequel. 

The finale of The Darkness 2 saw Jackie literally casting himself into Hell in an attempt to be with Jenny. However, this turned out to be a trick on the part of his enemies. Because of his closeness to the Darkness and the lives he took on Earth, Jackie was seemingly condemned to an eternity in Hell. 

So what happened next? Well, in the comics upon which the game series was based, Jackie eventually made his way out of Hell. However, the events of the games were markedly different from those in the comics, so it's hard to say just how things would have played out. Unfortunately, a planned DLC for The Darkness 2 was canceled due to the game's low sales, so we may never know how players were meant to pull Jackie from the abyss.

After six games of espionage and intrigue, the post-credits scene in Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow showed series protagonist Gabe Logan planning to finally retire from his dangerous life. He stumbled upon longtime supporting character Lawrence Mujari dead and was shortly thereafter shot multiple times. The screen went dark as Gabe bled out on the floor next to Lian Xing, his closest friend and partner. It was a daring way to end any video game, let alone the latest entry in a long-running franchise. 

For folks hoping to one day see a continuation of the series and a second chance at life for poor Gabe Logan, a former Sony Bend employee explained that series writer and director John Garvin felt "burned out" on the franchise. They further said, "Don't hold your breath on that one ... Garvin literally killed off the main character so he wouldn't have to make any more SF games. Plus, despite all the praise, they didn't sell. Very low sales all around."

Bulletstorm was a silly game, packed full of graphic violence and the kind of foul language that made even its creative director a little embarrassed. Still, it was a fun time and featured a sci-fi-action story that saw several twists and turns as it came to the finish line. Bulletstorm's hero, Grayson Hunt, discovered that his old commanding officer, General Victor Sarrano, manipulated him into killing multiple innocent civilians. Following a final battle between the two, Sarrano was presumed dead and Grayson headed off to parts unknown. However, during the game's end credits, it was revealed that Sarrano was turned into a cyborg and was now more set on killing Grayson than ever. It was a cliffhanger that raised the stakes for a sequel.

Unfortunately, Bulletstorm did not do well enough in the sales charts to get that continuation that its developers at People Can Fly clearly expected. Though People Can Fly have said they'd love to maybe make a sequel someday, they have "no immediate plans" to do so. For the time being, fans will have to be content with the latest re-release of the game, which includes Duke Nukem as a playable character.

The Sly Cooper series presented a fun mix of stealth and platforming gameplay, following the titular anthropomorphic raccoon Sly and his merry band of thieves. Thieves in Time, the fourth game in the series, followed the gang as they used a time machine to stop the mad thief Cyrille Le Paradox from screwing up history. The finale of the game saw an unconscious Sly stranded in ancient Egypt, with seemingly no way of contacting his friends or returning home. 

Sadly, sales for Thieves in Time were not at all what had been hoped, and the series' developers at Sanzaru Games announced that they would not be working on a fifth entry. Likewise, while an animated series based on the game franchise was announced, it seems to have been oddly swept under the rug or otherwise had its release pushed back to an unknown date. While it's unclear if the cartoon would have ever addressed this cliffhanger, it would have been nice to see Sly and his crew back in action in some form. As it stands, we may never know if Sly is still somewhere among the pyramids. 

The Force Unleashed series followed the adventures of Darth Vader's secret apprentice, Galen Marek. After turning on his master and attempting to renounce his evil ways, Galen was killed in the first game's finale. After being cloned by Vader in an attempt to create the perfect apprentice, Marek escaped and fought to put his shattered memories back together.

By the end of the second game, Galen had reunited with Juno Eclipse, the woman he loved before his first death, as well as taken Vader into custody. As Galen and Juno flew away into a more hopeful future, they had no idea they were being followed by Slave 1, the ship belonging to intergalactic bounty hunter Boba Fett.

And ... that was it. DLC for the game followed an alternate version of Marek from the game's dark side ending, in which he tore through the galaxy, killing all of our favorite heroes from the franchise. With 2014's announcement that the Star Wars expanded universe was no longer canon, The Force Unleashed is unlikely to ever see a genuine conclusion, leaving Galen's fate uncertain.

James Bond 007: Blood Stone picked up after the events of the 2008 film Quantum of Solace. Bond must put a halt to a conspiracy to create biological weapons that involved several different terrorist organizations. Along the way, he became entangled with Nicole Hunter, an MI6 contact who had been secretly feeding information to the enemy. 

Throughout the game, Bond was told that there was a higher authority at work, someone else pulling the strings behind each of the organizations he had been fighting. When Bond uncovered Nicole's part in the conspiracy, he confronted her, but she was killed by an unmanned drone just before she could tell him the name of the man she worked for. The credits began to roll and we were promised, "James Bond will return."

Well, he did, but not in this continuity (or in the terrible the terrible 007 Legends). Sadly, Bizarre Creations, the developer behind the game, closed for good a few years later. Between that and publisher Activision's reluctance to produce any more licensed games (particularly Bond), it's highly unlikely that we will ever find out who the real Big Bad was in Blood Stone.

It has been argued that Ninja Theory's DMC: Devil May Cry was a better game than its reputation would suggest, presenting an interesting twist on characters and concepts that fans of Devil May Cry had come to know and love. One of the weakest parts of this game, however, was the ending. After twin demon hunters Vergil and Dante destroyed the demon king Mundus, the entire human world was left in something of a predicament. The demonic realm of Limbo had spilled over into their reality, leaving monsters roaming the streets. Dante learned that Vergil planned to use the resulting power vacuum as a means to take over the human world, which led to a duel between the two brothers. Vergil escaped and Dante swore to protect the human realm and set things right.

A DLC for was released for this game that followed Vergil battling his way through the underworld and claiming even greater power, setting us up to expect even further dangers that never came to fruition. Flash forward six years and the series' original timeline resumed with Devil May Cry 5, which seems to preclude any chance of the DMC reboot timeline continuing. 

The Evil Dead franchise is no stranger to cliffhanger endings, loose ends, and wacky continuity. Heck, even the third film in the series, Army of Darkness, more or less contradicts how the preceding film ended, making its lead into a prisoner, rather than a hero. That undercurrent of unfinished business continued into the video games based on the series, but perhaps the most unsatisfying "ending" of the franchise was that of 2003's Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick.

This game (naturally) ignored the apocalyptic ending of the previous game and followed a time-traveling plot wherein Evil Dead hero Ash Williams attempted to free the world from the control of the undead. After slaying his way through three different time periods full of Deadites and their Queen, Ash found himself once again thrown back in time. The game ended as Ash grabbed a katana and slew two Deadite samurai. 

Though the following game presented an interesting alternate history take on the franchise, existing in its own separate timeline, perhaps the greatest injustice in the Evil Dead series was depriving us of a whole game of Ash battling undead samurai.

At the risk of sounding overly negative, this one isn't such a terrible loss. 2009's Bionic Commando was an attempt at reviving the goofy action franchise as a gritty story of wartime betrayal and human experimentation. The results were pretty laughable, with a script that embraced nearly every grim cliche in the book and introduced some truly ludicrous concepts, such as a plot twist that saw our protagonist, Nathan Spencer, discovering that his bionic arm contained the essence of his dead wife (no joke). 

The game ended with a climactic battle against Super Joe, Spencer's corrupt former partner. There was an explosion, and the screen cut to black as Spencer fell into a massive hole in the ground. A post-credits scene showed a sniper that had been following Spencer throughout the game reporting to his superiors and planning the next phase of their inscrutable mission. It was hinted by the game's end credits that the sniper was Thomas Clarke, a character from Capcom's Mercs, implying some kind of shared universe.

Whatever the sniper's plans were and whether or not Spencer survived is unclear, but Bionic Commando's weak performance in sales and reviews pretty much put a stop to this timeline.