Are there any video games in which the character you play is basicly doomed from the beginning? Where you fight the good fight, and maybe have some interesting adventures on the way, but it turns out that your entire quest was merely the road to hell? Sort of a video game equivalent of The Wicker Man or Angel Heart? The Half-Life series sorta counts but in those you win a victory of sorts and are still alive at the end.
Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. Boys version.
Played that damn thing through for nothing! You can’t continue as your son or wife or anything. Grumble.
What?
Silent Hill 2 and 4 spring to mind depending on the ending you get. I’ll spoiler box them.
Silent Hill 2: Having entered the town in search of your dead wife, you realize that you killed her. She was terminally ill of course, but you aren’t a nice guy. Endingwise you will either commit suicide by driving your car into a lake, leave town with the hoochie you find who begins to cough (terminally) on the way out, or you use the evil powers that inhabit the town to ressurect your wife.There are a couple of other endings, but those ones are more on the goofy side.
Silent Hill 4: This one isn’t as bad as SH2. Either you and the girl are killed, releasing the unholy killer on the world, or just the girl dies and you leave. If you are really good, both escape. There may be more to the endings, but it’s been a while since I’ve played them.
Your character isn’t doomed at the finish of Fatal Frame 2, but the ending is a bit of a downer. You spend the game trying to save your gimpy twin sister in an asian Brigadoon and trying to avoid some unholy ritual. At the end…you are caught in the unholy ritual and you wind up killing your gimpy little sister.
Last one I can think of is Shadow of the Colossus. You travel around a land killing giant beasts in order to gain the power to bring a girl back to life. You start to think that something is up when after each Colossus you kill, you start to get darker, greasier, and more evil looking.You do wind up bringing the girl back to life, but you also restore an ancient demon god who had been shattered into twelve parts. Once restored, he takes over your body and essentially you die. More accurately, you get turned into a little horned baby which brings the game around into their first game, Ico.
Those are the ones I can think of.
Planescape: Torment has some pretty bad endings, and even the “best” ending isn’t all that happy, though it is appropriate.
[spoiler]You have to subdue or fight former incarnations of your splintered self; if you lose to any of them, that incarnation wins and the game ends. Most of these other incarnations are real assholes, so this isn’t recommended.
Your friends - that is, the ones that you and/or your enemies haven’t killed before this point - all die somewhere around or before this time, and if you’re lucky, you get to bring one or more back to life. If not, they stay dead. You also have to confront a woman that you in one of your previous “lives” led on, used, and then ended up getting her killed.
The best possible ending is when you’ve merged your previous incarnations into a single being, and then you’re to be sent into the hells to fight in an endless war, as penance for the evils you committed in previous existences.[/spoiler]
Doesn’t your character become a willing host for the demon at the end of Diablo?
Just about all the early ones, right? Can you beat Space Invaders?
As far as classic games go, the robots in Robotron 2084 are going to kill the last human alive (you) sooner or later.
That’s not really the same. That’s just playing until either the game gets too fast or the player gets fatigued. I think a game really needs to have a plot to be a candidate for the thread.
FFVII may have an ambiguous enough ending to qualify.
Not after the movie.
Doom?
I haven’t seen the movie.
Eternal Darkness is a bit like that. If you play through it once, you defeat the ancient monster and everything’s fine. If you play through three times with the three different alignments, then you get a special extended ending.
The three different times you played were parallel realities in which Mantorok manipulated everyone to make the three ancients destroy each other. Now as he slowly dies over the next few centuries, he sits…plotting…
The original (1993) Doom had three episodes, Knee-deep in the dead, The Shores of Hell and Inferno. Each episode had 9 levels. At the ninth level of The Shores of Hell, called Fortress of Mystery, when you finish the level you are teleported into a dark room filled with monsters that kill you and then you continue on to the next episode, Inferno. It happens so fast that most players never notice it. You can use cheat codes (iddqd for God mode) and kill the monsters, but then the level never ends and you cannot proceed. You have to be dead to go to inferno!
Some clarification, FerretHerder
The “good” ending is where you revive all your companions and still go to hell (or Baator). A lesser ending is where you get the chance to fight the Transcendent One alone or by reviving one or two of your companions (IIRC Morte isn’t really dead). You pretty much go to hell either way, but at least with the good ending, you end up making things better for others.
I haven’t played I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream yet, but if it’s anything like the original story, there is no happy ending.
Yes, the idea being that a being of strong will can confine the demon, even with a broken crystal/soul gem/whatever those things were called; one of the books you can find along the way makes it clear that can work, at least for a while. It’s revealed in Diablo II that Diablo broke free; so yes, your character is doomed.
Knee-Deep in the Dead (the shareware version anyway) ends the same way.
Sims 2 
hahah! I was going to say the same thing! Sims 2.
In Deus Ex, one of the ways to play is as a total pacifist, where you use the cattle prod, tranq dards and baton to beat people unconscious rather than killing them. You can get a fair way through the game before you have to start killing people in large quantities, but eventually, to progress forward, your character has to become a stone-cold killer.
It may not be exactly the type of ‘doomed’ you’re looking for, but the plot of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is pretty tweaked. You don’t exactly die, but if you’re looking for a ‘Road to Hell’, quite literally… And again with the ‘victory… of sorts’, thing.
It’s a pretty long, obscure RPG, though.
The main character in Final Fantasy X also has a bit of that, although the sequel, X-2, kind of flips it back around.
If I’m not wrong, Twisted Metal 2 also had majorly tweaked endings, but granted, the game didn’t have that much of a ‘plot’ to start with.