Warning: Spoilers are a type of ending. I will end as little as possible. This article discusses the endings of Clive Barker’s Jericho, Limbo and Nier.

First: Clive Barker’s Jericho concludes with a puzzle battle against a floating baby. The victorious team of paranormals swims to the ocean’s surface. Credits roll.

Second: Limbo ends with a gravity-twisting plunge into a vertical lake, followed by a scene in which the silhouette boy wakes up in a forest and tentatively approaches a silhouette girl. Before he can reach her, credits roll.

Third: Nier is something else altogether. It ends four times. Each time, credits roll.

There are other endings, of course—endings of failure and disinterest and frustration—but certain games lay bare their intentions. When the player has successfully unraveled a game’s core narrative, they can expect to see credits crawling up their screen. Credits are the True Ending. It is known.

The City of Angels is flying high because everyone is tripping on dope weed these days. Fifty pound shipments have been showing up all over L.A., fat bags stuffed inside mariachi-themed donkey toys. The boys have traced the donkeys back to one Freddie Calhoun, erotic propmaker. Calhoun has proven to be surprisingly elusive when cornered, fleeing to his car and enacting a dangerous getaway to the Natural History Museum hedge maze, where he inevitably disappears.

But Calhoun’s a dumb son of a bitch—he makes the mistake of returning to his apartment every single time—and, on their seventh attempt, the detectives are able to avoid crashing into oncoming streetcars and pedestrians just long enough to ram Calhoun’s vehicle into a phone booth. After forcing him into the trunk of his own car (NOTE: possible breach of protocol here), the detectives abandon their own vehicle and drive back to Calhoun’s apartment for a second look. The perp suspect is brought upstairs for interrogation.

Ace investigator Cole Phelps is on the case.

Some wars are fought with friends at your side, but others must be braved while everyone's away at work. Pubbies: May the Locust eat ‘em, and the Devil eat the Locust. Is there any redemption for souls as black as these?

Gears of War 3: the twilight hours of the multiplayer beta. The map is Trenches, where the opening sprint out of spawn is always instructive. Five COG soldiers run in silent unison. Then we peel apart, and the augury is on. Where will they go? What are their goals?

It's important to watch. Without voices, communication is reduced to observation. Three marines rush the hill where the Oneshot awaits—the all-powerful sniper rifle with a laser sight that roams the battlefield like the Eye of Sauron. Every pubbie wants a piece of the Oneshot and its impervious dispensary of death. Those who aren’t torn apart on that smoky hill will dance their petulance before the lucky sniper, getting in the way and griefing their aim.

One COG stands at spawn, motionless and solitary, for a good five minutes. She comes to life just in time to run into spawn campers. She dies. She dies again. And again. And again, smashed flat against the rocks. (It’s very important to lock down the Mortar on this map.) She quits in the middle of the match. I’m about ready to quit too.

A defector fires wildly into their flanks, pruning the unaware as they turn in surprise. He’s killing his own guys. His handle is 'Ka0s42O', and his teammates are surely cursing his sudden but inevitable betrayal.

I pause, rocket launcher at the ready, reticule lined up. Ka0s42O is blue. I am red. I am fundamentally programmed to exterminate all that is blue. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.

Yet I hesitate, letting the team-killer run rampant. The dilemma is simple math: Blue killing blue equals win for red. A traitorous dissenter mowing down his teammates with back-biting bullets, doing my job for me, is a gift. Is the team-killer of my enemy not my friend?

“Release! Release!”
This pitiable cry comes from a green-skinned mutant-man, who’s tugging in vain at the flail grenades you wrapped around his neck. The grenades beep—they’ll detonate in a second or so—but out comes your boot, kicking the mutant off the catwalk to plummet to his death on the rocks far below. Or will the grenades turn him into blooming red fireworks first?
Does it really matter? This poor green lizard-guy drifts over the ravine in a slow-motion sentence; he’s f*cked either way. But yes, it does matter here, in this game, so you pull out your pistol and shoot him in the face with a fiery flare. Gratuitously, the flare explodes.
ENLIGHTENMENT +250. SADIST +50.
The Skillshot names are darkly appropriate, but more important in the moment is the gameplay outcome: Now you have enough points to buy some more flares, so you can get on with the killing. And this is Bulletstorm.

You are at a social gathering and the sit-down small talk has ebbed to its conclusion. An awkward silence fills the room: the silence of opportunity. “Let’s play a game,” someone suggests.

>>RESPOND YES
“Games are a social lubricant,” you say. Bad phrasing. Everyone stares at you like you’ve just proposed a mudslide orgy. Cassandra rummages in her purse; looking for five hundred Bermuda wedding photos to share, no doubt. The evening is balanced on a knife’s edge.

>>LOOK ROOM
Your brain churns and your eyes dart around the foreign apartment, searching for implements of gaming. If Cassandra finds those pictures, you’ll need to chain-smoke on the balcony for the next two hours to survive the night.

You see an Xbox 360.

Obvious exits are to the BALCONY and out the front DOOR.

>>PLAY GAME

So we’ve been waiting, me and the boys, standing still in this hellhole conflict for far too long. Five minutes in, and wouldn’t you know it? We’re right where we started: holding at the ready beside our barracks, decked out in full infantry gear and beautifully prepared to start taking some ground and blasting some filthy f*cking Nazis. Problem is, we ain’t got no orders.

No directions. No command from up above. Nobody authorizin’ us to go and secure that nice little hilltop, which is where we need to be to win this thing. That there hill’s a superior vantage over the enemy, plain to see. We could flush ‘em out and shoot ‘em down, those Jerry-wagglers! And up on that hill, there’s a flagpole to boot. We put up them flags, we win. I seen it all, and it’s simple as that.

Our Flagpole Jimmy, he loves raising him some flags. I don’t know, but that sumbitch will raise an American flag on every flagpole he finds, guaranteed. He got a billion flags stashed in that old satchel of his.

But Flagpole Jimmy ain’t put no flags up yet, because we got no orders.

Five minutes. No orders.

“God dammit!” I scream. Disconnected again. “Are you guys using the phone?”

“No,” I hear, from the top of the basement stairs.

But one of my sisters has picked up the phone, instantly severing my internet connection at a crucial moment. On screen my soulless spear-throwers, frozen, are moving in on the enemy’s flank, a perfectly-laid plan vanished into the ether of sh*tty dial-up.

“You’ve been using the phone all night anyway,” she yells, and slams the door.

And it’s true: I’ve been on bungie.net for hours, playing Myth II: Soulblighter. But my selfish monopoly on the household’s single phone line has a purpose. I’m after Bogivon, my new arch-nemesis, trying to salvage a win from the myriad losses I’ve suffered at the hands of his flamboyant forces this day.

Neon pink. Bogivon’s armies are always neon pink, which looks ridiculous and makes defeat just that much worse. At first I thought he was a girl, until he typed “FUK U hahaha” after a particularly nasty beat-down. No online lady would be this much of a dick. I am furious at this character, at his tactical expertise and freakish military prowess. I must destroy him before bedtime.

Welcome to the final FINAL version (1.1.*.2) of my FAQ for SupaLong Adventure, the greatest video game ever released!!!

If you follow this FAQ to the letter, it should take you less than 110 hours to beat the game properly. Of course, that’s to complete the game ONCE—you need to finish SupaLong Adventure at least six times to see all the endings and get 100%.

If you started a game before picking up this FAQ, go delete all your saves right now because I guarantee you already missed something. Did you defeat Commandante Evilino in the jumping-jack contest during the tutorial? Yeah?? Did you beat him by at least 25? If not, you’ll never be able to get the SlimFast Exercise Medal later on. The game totally tricked you, making you think jumping-jacks were an inconsequential exercise. Bye-bye, 100%.

In Red Dead Redemption, John Marston can ride from the shimmering heat of Mexico's deserts to a snow-blanketed coniferous forest in less than ten minutes. A few minutes later and he's in the Great Plains, picking poppies and watching in horror as his trusty horse gets gored in the flank by an ornery boar. The familiar set pieces of the Wild West are shrunken down and juxtaposed tightly together, the game world a microcosm of everything you might expect to see while watching a day-long marathon of Gunsmoke and Lone Ranger reruns.

It is little surprise, then, to find that the approximately 60 million American bison that were nearly hunted to extinction in Real Life are represented here as a herd of just twenty buffalo. The uncanny thing is that there will never be any more.