The Creepy Bad Endings of the Oddworld Games

[Music] hello and welcome back to the third annual october a month where we celebrate all things oddworld having reviewed every single one of the games at this point you might think it's a little bit weird how i've never actually spoken too much about any of the bad endings of the games and rather i've always gravitated towards talking about the canon good endings now though let's take a moment to delve into some of the darker aspects of the odd world universe and take a look at what happens when abe fails to rescue enough madokans and fails his quest the first game that featured a bad ending was actually the original oddworld game abe's odyssey i think that this was probably the first game i ever played that actually featured multiple endings of course i didn't know this at the time because it took me quite a while to actually complete it and even when i did eventually finish it i'm pretty sure i got the good ending but even so the idea of having a bad ending in a game was quite uncommon at the time and was normally seen in horror games like resident evil i think the thing that makes the bad ending of abe's odyssey so effective is that we actually start the game at the end with abe having been captured by the antagonist of the game malloc the glocken and the actual gameplay is all a flashback being a story told by a bizzy awaits his fate in the present day so when we finally learn how abe got himself into this situation by playing through the game it makes it all the more impactful when abe is literally just straight up murdered by molok after being dropped into a meat grinder the whole game has been about how abe has this greater purpose and is the chosen one who will become the savior of his species and then to have his life ended so abruptly it just doesn't feel right it honestly just leaves such a bad taste in my mouth even to this day seeing molok and a nearby slig laugh at abe's demise adds to the unsettling nature of this situation too and it just makes you feel so powerless the thing is though is that in order to actually get this ending you need to rescue less than 50 madokans to do this you pretty much have to go out of your way to ignore a lot of them and if you're truly that heartless then you could argue that this ending is deserved what you have to consider here though is that games like this normally wouldn't have actually had their plots altered depending on how you played the game so to have witnessed this back when the game came out would probably have been extremely shocking just to make you feel even worse about all of this before abe is brutally killed the other madokans talk about how they could save abe but because he didn't put enough effort into saving them they decide he isn't worth it and allow abe to meet his demise so it's like the shoe is on the other foot and rather than you deciding not to help your fellow madokans they just decide not to help you obviously with odd world new and tasty being a remake of abe's odyssey the bad ending in that game is pretty much exactly the same only i would argue that because of the brighter and slightly more cartoon-like graphical style it's probably not quite as intense but it's still horrific nonetheless but if you think that abe's odyssey was the only game in the series to feature a bad ending then you've got another thing coming because next up we're taking a look at the bad ending of abe's exodus just like abe's odyssey the bad ending here is achieved by rescuing less than half of the madokans and rather than shutting down soulstorm brewery and ending the torture of the madokans in order to extract tears for a beverage the bad ending instead shows abe confronted by a group of medukens who say the abe has been lazy by not helping them and proceed to knock him out using a nearby bottle we then see abe gaining consciousness begging for an unseen presence to stop as it's revealed is hooked up to one of the very torture machines that he's been witnessing the other madokans in the brewmaster glucken and his sidekick slig watch from a distance and discuss how they've been able to extract more tears than ever before which implies that not only has abe been getting tortured for quite a considerable amount of time but also probably other madokans too the brewmaster then decides to try and break the record for the most tier extractions in a day and they turn the machine on once again and watch as abe is electrocuted and because of the machine being turned up so much he's actually killed the brewmaster and the slig simply laugh at the situation content the abe is dead and they can now continue exploiting the other madokans with no interference this ending is probably even more sinister than the bad ending of abe's odyssey at least in that game abe is killed instantly but here the implication is that he's been slowly tortured to death for quite a while and is pretty much forced to face the reality that he's completely failed he ends up contributing to the very thing that he's been trying to put an end to for the whole game and basically just becomes another lamp to the slaughter the one positive note here that stops the game from being way too depressing is that when abe is killed he turns into a bunch of birds this implies the abe has been resurrected somewhere and could potentially try again to put an end to soul storm brewery but imagine how dark it would have been if he simply got resurrected in the tear extractor again the glucans would basically have an infinite supply of tears just by using abe as a torture subject a sick and an idea that luckily the game doesn't actually go for the next game we're talking about is odd world munch's odyssey and despite this game having the lightest overall tone of any of the odd world games strangely it also probably has the darkest bad ending yet the bad ending in munch's odyssey is achieved by having less than 50 of what's referred to as kwama this basically boils down to the same thing as the two previous games with rescuing less than half of the inhabitants resulting in the bad ending in this ending we see abe and munch approaching the last can of gaba eggs needed to bring munch's species back from the brink of extinction this stopped in the tracks by a group of fuzzles though who complain about how you didn't save them and how the vikas were able to conduct horrific experiments on them all because of you we even see the results of these experiments with them having bloodshot eyes and fuzzles in the background even having nails buzzsaws and syringes sticking out of them honestly this is probably one of the most unsettling scenes in the entire franchise things get worse from here though as the fuzzles activate the alarm system with the implication being that the vikas will be coming to capture abe and munch but to make matters even worse the fuzzles then attack the doer potentially killing them the next scene depressingly reveals the abe was decapitated and now has his head displayed on the wall of a vika surgery which is particularly unsettling because that could mean that the fuzzles from earlier didn't actually kill him and just incapacitated him while the vikas got there then afterwards he was probably experimented on before having his head removed and crudely displayed on a wall with the word loser underneath it just as a final insult to his legacy making matters worse it's then revealed that munch is still alive and is about to undergo surgery to remove his lungs to use as transplants for lady margaret lady margaret being the unseen gluck and queen who's mentioned throughout munch's odyssey wither having health decline due to lung problems we then watch as the vikus soar into munch's chest and remove his lungs the camera pan into a heart monitor which flatlines implying that the operation was successful and resulted in munch and abe dying and the gluck and queen living on due to munch's lung removal this is particularly dark because not only does abe meet a grizzly fate which is mostly off-screen leaving a lot of the details to our imagination which is almost more effective to be honest but then we also actually get to first hand experience the demise of munch which is handled by the vikas with such ease that it just feels wrong seeing these characters we've been playing as be slaughtered so mindlessly just feels so dirty next up we would be moving on to oddworld stranger's wrath but the thing is with this is that this particular game only actually has the one good ending so we spared the bad ending this time around i am kind of surprised that they didn't make it so that if you killed all of the bounties you got a worse ending as opposed to bringing them all in alive but i think for the story this game wanted to tell it makes sense that there's only the one ending so with oddworld strangers wrath out of the way that actually brings us onto the newest game released in the series with oddworld soulstorm which actually works slightly differently to the other games that we've spoken about so far oddworld soulstorm actually technically has four endings but the ones we're interested in are the worst ending and a bad ending because yeah rather than this just having a singular bad ending they had to give it a second even worse one let's dive into it if you rescue eighty percent of the madokans in six levels or less you'll get the worst ending although calling this an ending is perhaps being a little bit generous considering that it just consists of newspaper articles rather than being an actual cutscene now i would go into detail about what all of these newspapers are talking about but the weird thing with this is that they basically just describe what happens in the standard bad ending but go into a little bit more detail about the aftermath it's not like the worst ending is a separate ending entirely it more so just expands on the standard bad ending so instead of us analyzing these newspapers too much let's instead just talk about the actual bad ending so the bad ending of the game is achieved by getting 80 percent of the madokans rescued in 11 levels or below and this is where abe and two other madukans toby and alph are on a train after having raided a nearby glucan facility to create a cure for soul storm brew addiction the train that abe and the madokansaron zaron is being attacked by a group of flying sliggs and while toby and alpha panic in trying to get the train to reach its destination abe is transfixed by a mystical amulet which will supposedly tell him what to do next inside the amulet is a little bug thing that takes in all of the negativity from abe caused by him not rescuing enough medukens throughout the adventure the bug then dies and cracks into pieces leaving abe not knowing how to progress on his adventure he finally snaps out of his trance and goes to help toby and elf by throwing bottles of brew into the furnace to keep the train moving unfortunately abe trips and spills the brew all over the floor which then ignites and burns the three of them to death as abe helplessly spots a fire extinguisher in a locked room behind him the fiery train blasts into soulstorm brewery setting the whole facility ablaze it's also said that the pipelines leading to other facilities have also been set on fire meaning that they've effectively destroyed a whole network of factories meanwhile maluk watches from his blimp and is fully aware of the fact that he'll get the blame for this and decides to make a run for it and try and escape the inevitable security forces that will be sent to investigate the explosion by far the worst thing about this is watching as abe burns to death helplessly but the silver lining here is that he does still manage to destroy a whole bunch of glucan factories even if it does result in a lot of death he was still technically successful i guess it's probably the lightest of all of the bad endings in terms of that but it's still not nice to watch i especially don't like how visibly upset abe is that he's killed the insect in the amulet the fancy graphics and expressive animations in the cutscenes really shine in this moment it's just a very depressing ending because the whole thing could have so easily been avoided if abe had just not tripped over and dropped the soul storm brew bottles i feel like that adds a lot to the feeling of helplessness and the way that there's a fire extinguisher locked in another room easily within reach if they could just get through the door is just the depressing cherry on top but remember those newspapers we talked about earlier they actually explain how the events of this cutscene were twisted so that molok was responsible for the brewery explosion and is being used as a scapegoat to cover up the fact that abe even exists it's said that molok invented abe as a means to get away with destroying rupture farms potentially for insurance money and then he later destroyed soulstorm brewery because he was jealous of its success the impact of this cover-up though is that because everyone now believes abe didn't even ever exist the whole moduken revolution will be halted and they'll go back to being helplessly enslaved by the gluckens so although abe was kind of successful in destroying several glucan facilities his whole legacy has been erased and the destruction has also led to thousands of fatalities madokan and glucken alike in a way this actually makes this the bleakest ending of any of the oddworld games because it's like no one is a winner here there's nothing but death and destruction left behind enable will soon be completely forgotten makes me shudder just thinking about it so that's it every single bad ending in all of the odd world games what an utterly depressing way of ending october but still at least we can rest easy knowing that these bad endings aren't canon an abe is always successful in the end even if you get the bad endings on your first attempt you can always try again and do better on your second run and hey i think that's an important life lesson even if you're not successful to begin with keep trying and you'll eventually succeed in whatever you're trying to do and with that we've wrapped up october season three this is probably going to be the final ever october just because we've pretty much spoken about everything that i want to talk about oddworld related we've covered every single game all of the dlc and tons of side subjects too so i don't really think there's anything left for us to talk about having said that though obviously if a new game in the series ever gets released or any significant dlc for that matter you know that i'll be here to cover it it just obviously won't be a part of an october marathon like all of my previous oddworld content has been but anyway let me know down in the comments what you think the darkest oddworld ending is and also give this video a like if you enjoyed it and enjoyed the october marathon in general subscribe to see more stuff like this coming soon and i'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Pixel Pursuit

Views: 61,128

Keywords: oddworld, oddworld bad endings, oddworld bad ending, game bad endings, abes oddysee bad ending, abes exoddus bad ending, munchs oddysee bad ending, soulstorm bad ending, oddworld soulstorm bad ending, oddworld abes oddysee bad ending, oddworld abes exoddus bad ending, oddworld munchs oddysee bad ending, bad endings, oddtober, pixel pursuit, oddworld marathon, oddworld series, oddworld review series, oddworld youtuber, oddworld lore, oddworld videos, oddworld review

Id: mhvNBCWMVt0

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021