Multiple Endings

I just finished playing Haru to Shura, a short story-rich adventure game by MIYAKOpubl, with help from Studio Pixel. It's a really touching story about trauma, coping, and friendship, but I'll avoid talking about the story itself. Go play the game—it's only $5 on Steam. Instead, I want to talk about how it juggled having multiple endings in one of the most satisfying ways I've seen any game do.

Generally, I'm not a fan of games with multiple endings. I find it's often used as a cheap way to extend the runtime of a game by giving you incomplete conclusions so you feel the need to replay the game X number of times to feel satisfied. Games like Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach come to mind. No ending really answered all your questions or left you feeling satisfied, so you feel the need to go back, replay the game, and get the other endings. As much as I love their games, Supermassive Games also loves to do this. After my third playthrough of The Quarry, I started to get sick of the game and felt unsatisfied with the answers I had received. This use of multiple endings is unnecessary and just feels cumbersome.

Some games use their multiple endings as an integral part to their overarching narrative. These kinds of games can be great, such as UNDERTALE, whose neutral, true pacifist, and genocide endings all tie together into one larger story. Each playthrough is enough of a unique experience compared to the others that they feel fresh and enjoyable, even though you're going through the same core game several times over. OMORI and OneShot are two other great examples of this. The key to these games remaining enjoyable is that things throughout the playthrough change quickly enough to keep you engaged. However, it can get to a point that replaying the same unchanged sections of a game gets to be boring.

Then we have Haru to Shura. It has five separate endings depending on what choices you make through the game. But unlike any of the games that fall into the first two categories above, I only felt the need to achieve one. Maybe I'm lucky and just so happened to get the most complete ending. But even then, when that's happened in previous games I've still felt the need to go back and get the other endings. Haru to Shura on the other hand gave me an ending that answered my questions and left me satisfied. After finishing the game, I felt no need to go back and get the other endings. Doing so might alter how I feel about the ending I got, and I don't want that. I wish more multiple-ending games were like that. Why is it that every game needs to have multiple endings so we have to play the game several times. That gets to be a chore. What I really want are more games that put enough thought and effort into their endings so that they can provide players with an ending that both makes sense given their decisions, and also makes the player feel like they got a satisfying and complete story.

In conclusion: go play Haru to Shura.