Uncertain Doom / Video Games

• Bendy and the Ink Machine has Henry visiting the studio he used to work at, on request of his old friend Joey Drew. Game play ends with the player activating the cut scene that begins by him killing Bendy, but it's unclear of whether he actually made it out of the studio — especially with the Gainax Ending.
• Buckshot Roulette: The entity stays down after you win the final round, having cut off its own life support to raise the stakes. Your prize money is given to you by a machine, but the fact that two ominous red lights briefly glow in the darkness before the suitcase appears suggests that it is still alive.
• Call of Duty is a violent series where Anyone Can Die, which makes it all the more conspicuous when characters disappear without explanation. Weaver, Nevski, Brooks, and Crosby from the Black Ops subseries are notable examples.
• With the exception of the ending where you try escaping through the backdoor of the cafe, The Closing Shift has two endings that end ambiguously. The protagonist either escapes her stalker through the air vent or dropping a brick on him and later finds him waiting for her in either her car or her apartment. The game ends as he either climbs over the car seats or coming out of the nearby closet with no clear indication of the poor woman’s fate.
• Dead Rising 2: In Ending A, Chuck Greene, the protagonist, ends up trapped in an elevator surrounded by zombies, with the last shot of him lying on the ground as one of the horde goes in for the kill. The follow-up, Case West, actually opens immediately after that shot: Frank West suddenly shows up and saves him.
• Deltarune: At the end of Chapter 2, when returning to the Light World after having completed the Weird Route, Berdly doesn't wake up, and exactly why this is isn't made clear. On the one hand, the Snowgrave spell is explicitly described as "Fatal", but on the other hand, examining the graveyard in the Light World implies that monsters still turn to dust when they die, and that hasn't happened in this case. Either way, the character in question isn't seen or mentioned again for the remainder of the chapter.
• Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening]]: The Architect, if you decide to kill him. He doesn't appear for the rest of the game, but the clearing of the Deep Roads that he's said to be responsible for if he lives still happens in II. Inquisition also heavily implies that he is of the same kind as Big Bad Corypheus, and Corypheus is confirmed to possess the same Body Surf Resurrective Immortality as Archdemons do (without the caveat that it can't be done to Grey Wardens), so it's entirely possible that the Architect took over some darkspawn offscreen and then had the sense to stay out of the heroes' way afterwards.
• Ecco the Dolphin, reboot, Defender of Future has Ecco escape from a giant Morey eel. Once Ecco manages to escape, the rocks are shown falling. It isn't clear if they directly killed an eel but even if they didn't, the eel could be presumed to be trapped there and starve.
• In The Elder Scrolls series backstory, Emperor of Tamriel Uriel Septim V launched an invasion of Akavir. Despite initial successes, he would fail to conquer Akavir, and was reported dead after he personally led the tenth legion in covering the retreat of the rest of his forces. His death was reported by Imperial soldiers who weren't close enough to the scene to see if the arrow barrage actually killed him. Besides which, the Imperial soldiers were Unreliable Narrators given that they only told their stories much later in life and were in the middle of a panicked rout when they supposedly saw him fall. If he did survive, it could mean the Septim bloodline might still exist in Akavir and his line would have a better claim to the throne than the Mede dynasty in Tamriel.
• A lot of the hunters in Evolve fall victim to this. Markov, Hank, and Val may or may not die facing the Phantom Wraith, Parnell, Sunny, Emet, and Bucket might die or remain trapped in the monsters' dimension after the final battle, and Torvald, Jack, Lazarus, Slim, and Crow never had their roles in the story finalized and may have died anywhere from their time on Shear to the final battle.
• Follows-Chalk, a companion in the Honest Hearts DLC add-on for Fallout: New Vegas has a strong case of wanderlust, wanting to see what the world is like beyond the cliffs of Zion Canyon. He is however utterly naive as to what is actually out there. The Courier can either persuade him to remain in Zion with his tribe and family, or feed his wanderlust and convince him to strike out and learn for himself. If the latter, Chalk is happy, but is forced to sneak out at night against the wishes of his beleaguered family. The narration makes a point of saying that he is "never seen again," leaving it up in the air if he's merely never seen in Zion again or he ends up disappearing entirely, ending up dead or worse...
• Cahara from Fear & Hunger has this fate due to its sequel adapting several of the preceding game's endings — it's never outright confirmed if he was the one to have helped the God of Fear & Hunger ascend, dying in the process, but with implicit confirmation of the fates of all of the other playable characters, the aforementioned scenario is likely.
• Final Fantasy XVI:
  • This is the ultimate fate of the protagonist, Clive. After saving the world, he's left lying on a beach, with his arm becoming infected with the Bearers' curse of petrification that comes with overuse of magic. That said, it's been shown to be possible to live with the curse long-term, with the loss of magic from the world further casting doubt on his fate. It's left ambiguous whether Clive dies then and there, survives with a shortened lifespan, or lives a long and happy life with Jill.
  • The matter of if Clive's brother Joshua survived the events of the game or not is left unclear. While he does die thanks to Ultima performing a Chest Burster, Clive goes over to his corpse and heals his wounds with the power of the Phoenix. On the one hand, it's stated that the Phoenix can heal, but not revive. But on the other, the final scene of the game shows the story's events chronicled in a book... written under the name of Joshua Rosfield. Whether this means that Joshua ultimately survived, or someone else wrote the book under his name is never definitively answered.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The fate of Sigurd's army in the end of the first generation of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, as they were ambushed by Arvis and his forces in an event known as the Belhalla Massacre. The only directly stated fate of his forces are Sigurd himself (who was executed by Arvis), Quan and Ethlyn (who left the army earlier and were later killed in the Yied Massacre), Finn (who also left with Quan and Ethlyn and was left behind in Leonster where he became the mentor of their son, Leif), the women (who at least survived to have children after the Massacre though Ayra is implied to be a casualty herself), Claud (who was confirmed killed in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776), and Lewyn (killed by Manfroy, but got better).
  • In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, major villain Sonia Reed survives her encounter with the party but is badly wounded. This is followed by a scene where she's found by her immediate superior Limstella, who rather than help her, insults her for her failure and then leaves. We never learn Sonia's exact fate, but she's never seen or mentioned again. If you skip Sonia's sidequest, Limstella explicitly confesses to killing her in a cutscene.
  • On the Conquest route of Fire Emblem Fates, Orochi and Reina are defeated during Chapter 13, and the enemy forces are massacred by Hans after the battle ends. It's never confirmed if they were among the dead, but neither is mentioned again and as the survival of other named characters tends to be made more explicit, it's easy to assume they died.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
    • Students who run out of HP in Classic Mode during Part I are written off in such a way that they don't die, but suffer a Game-Breaking Injury that puts them out of action for the duration of the game. During the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, any student taken out during Part I is given a description of why they weren't able to reunite at the beginning of Part II. While most of these epilogues for casualties explains that they had died between Parts I and II, others are more ambiguous. Some examples: Dorothea is last seen going into hiding with her opera troupe, Mercedes is forced into an arranged marriage, Marianne disappears with a single horse (with the implication that she was Driven to Suicide), Bernadetta falls ill and isolates herself, Petra returns to Brigid, and a handful of other students go missing.
    • This is the fate of Gilbert, Rodrigue and most of the Blue Lions after Chapter 17 on the Verdant Wind and Silver Snow routes. Dimitri is explicitly Killed Offscreen in the former and heavily implied to be dead in the latter, but the fate of the others is unknown, although as their army lost that battle badly and they're never mentioned again, it's unlikely they survived. On Verdant Wind, Annette claims that her father Gilbert was last seen leaving Gronder Field with Dimitri's body if she was recruited, while Felix mentions not having heard from his father. On Silver Snow, Dimitri (who may be a ghost or a hallucination) tells Byleth that Rodrigue and Gilbert died alongside him.
    • Rhea at the end of the Verdant Wind route and the Scarlet Blaze route. In Verdant Wind, she’s badly injured and at the end is implied to have died of her injuries, but it’s never explicitly stated that she did, with the possibility left open that she might have fallen into a Convenient Coma to heal. Scarlet Blaze sees her fall into a canyon alongside Thales; Edelgard states that No One Could Survive That! but given that Byleth does in canon, it’s entirely possible that she could have survived with injuries that would require a few years to heal.
• Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars: Hsin Jiaoming ends the final mission laying in a pool of his own blood after Wu Lee throws the Yu Jian Sword at him. Wade Heston arrests him on trumped-up charges ("...well, I guess I'll think of something really heavy on the way to the station"), but whether Hsin survives past this is unknown.
• Poor, poor Mr. K in Grand Theft Auto V. He is subjected to brutal Cold-Blooded Torture (including getting hit in the groin with a wrench, having his tooth pulled out with pliers, being electrocuted and waterboarded, with no medical attention aside from an adrenaline shot should he give out), and after the deed is done Trevor simply dumps him at an airport where he proceeds to fall down a flight of stairs. He is never seen or heard from again.
• Half-Life 2:
  • At the end of the game, Gordon Freeman destroys the dark-energy teleporter Dr. Breen intended to use to teleport himself out of Earth, the platform that was lifting Dr. Breen then collapses and thus seems to fall to his death. However, in the sequel Episode One, a recorded conversation between Dr. Breen and one of the Combine's Advisors (which is also briefly seen before the Final Boss fight in the previous game) implies he transferred his mind into an Advisor.
  • At the end of the chapter "We Don't Go To Ravenholm", Father Grigori disappears into a crypt behind a wall of flames while shooting at zombies. Whether he survives or not is left ambiguous.
• In Honkai: Star Rail, the "Tingyun" accompanying the party for most of the Xianzhou Luofu arc is revealed to be the Lord Ravager Phantylia puppetering a body and claiming to be Tingyun. However, the fate of the real Tingyun, or if there even was a real Tingyun to begin with, is rendered inconclusive.
• Biker in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. The game ends in nuclear fire, but his location is not shown being nuked.
• The House have you investigating the titular Haunted House, and uncovering the true circumstances of what caused the death of the previous family living in it - as it turns out, the wife realized she was dying of a fatal disease, pulled a Pater Familicide on her husband and kids, and died. As you explore the house you're confronted by the ghosts of the kids, the husband... and the last ghost you encounter is the wife's, as she traps you in a dead end. The game ends abruptly after that.
• Volga in Hyrule Warriors. While he does collapse after his final defeat, he doesn't have a unique death cutscene like Wizzro and Cia have, nor does the game ever outright say he's dead, leaving his ultimate fate up in the air.
• The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: At the end, Malefor is pulled into a crystal core by spirits of ancient dragons, rays of light are shown shining from the core as it breaks apart, and he is never seen again. Was Malefor sealed inside the core forever or was he destroyed inside it? Or was he simply Dragged Off to Hell? No mention is made as to whether Malefor appeared or didn't appear in the book that gets a page for every dragon that dies.
• The "grandchildren" level of Life: the Game has the kids get electrocuted, poisoned, and set on fire if you lose, but they're never confirmed to have lived or died.
• Kingdom Hearts at one point had an example from the original Chain of Memories before it got conclusively confirmed in its remake years later. Organization member Zexion gets attacked by Riku in a cutscene, but unlike his cohorts, he’s too much of a coward to engage in an actual battle and flees. When he returns to his base, Axel is there to greet him with the Riku Replica. Wanting to finish off the rest of the Castle Oblivion crew at this point, Axel orders the Riku Replica to kill Zexion and steal his power. The screen fades to black as Zexion pleads for his life and then slashing sounds are heard. No mention is made of him after this, but oddly enough the Riku Replica displays none of Zexion's abilities when he’s fought later. In the follow-up, Kingdom Hearts II, Sora visits the graves of the Organization. The red graves signify the dead members and the blue graves signify the living ones, but Zexion's is purple and broken — likely because the developers hadn’t thought of a weapon for him at the time (since the graves prominently show each member’s weapon). This looked highly suspicious and made some fans question whether he had actually died or not. The remake dispelled any ambiguity including the nature of why the Replica ends up with some of Zexion's powers, when he's very explicitly shown going limp and fading away in the Riku Replica’s hands.
• Midnight Fight Express: At the end of the game, Babyface and Droney are both wounded (with Babyface being shot, and Droney taking damage from using their energy) at the top of the collapsing and burning building. They live long enough to see the sunrise, but their fate from there is unknown.
• The Parkour Assassin, Celeste in Mirror's Edge vanishes after their confrontation with Faith when the latter blows up a gas canister between them. Since they are never seen nor mentionned again, it's unclear whether or not they could have escaped like Faith did. Cut dialogues from the Big Bad would confirm their demise in the explosion but the canonicity is dubious.
• In Nemesis 3: The Eve of Destruction, if the player fails to pick up an important shielding item during the game, the bad ending will commence. David Burton is attacked by Venom while trying to time-travel back to the present. However he can't use his ship's built-in shield while warping at the same time (whereas the shield item can be used in conjunction with warping), so he drops out of warp in hopes of defending himself. What happens to him next is not made clear; instead the game cuts back to black and shows an event log stating that David is missing in action. The last shot of the game is of Venom laughing at the player.
• Nintendo Wars: In Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, Davis vanishes following the events of Salvation, with his last words on screen being him panicking about not wanting to die (as he had contracted symptoms of the Creeper).
• The third entry of Orcs Must Die! has an ancient rival of Master Cygnus reappearing with the ability to summon rifts... an ability that, explicitly, only the oldest living war mage is able to use and which previously belonged to Cygnus. Since Cygnus would have been incredibly old at the time the game began, the protagonists assume that he must have passed away. However, this is never confirmed in-game, and the Big Bad talks as though he is certain that Cygnus is still alive. Then again, the years have not been kind to him.
• Papers, Please:
  • When detaining an entrant, they're escorted off never to be seen again, with the sole exception of Jorji Costava, a recurring character who keeps coming back to try to enter the country again and again.
  • When you first meet M. Vonel, if you make the mistake of handing him the EZIC symbol document, you are arrested for your alleged involvement with EZIC and the game narration explains that your recent activities will be audited. Whether this means imprisonment or death for you is not made clear.
  • Several bad endings remark that "the fate of your family is unknown", most notably endings where you are executed and endings where you flee Arstotzka but leave some family members behind.
• In Persona 5, Black Mask isn't definitively showing dying, but their fate is left very up in the air. After saving the Phantom Thieves from his cognitive self in Shido's palace, Goro Akechi is never seen again. Futaba claims she cannot detect his presence anymore, the police has labeled him as "missing" and the general public has pretty much forgotten about him. Royal has Black Mask come back in the Third Semester, but Maruki claims that this is a result of his reality, which has resulted in people who were confirmed dead (Wakaba, Okumura, the Niijima sisters' father and one NPC's dog), and that if the world were to go back to normal, Akechi would disappear. Akechi is never seen again after Maruki's defeat, and is assumed dead, but the player character catches sight of someone wearing Akechi's uniform at the end of the game.
• In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, this is the fate of Ogerpon's friend. When she left the cave they were living in, she later returned to find it empty, and three of their masks were stolen. The Loyal Three had the masks, but Ogerpon's friend was never found afterwards. Considering Ogerpon's reaction was to beat the Loyal Three to (near-) death and she's been alone for as long as she has, it's likely her friend was killed, but his fate is never stated for certain.
• James Sunderland from Silent Hill 2. There's no canon ending to the game and thus his ultimate fate is left ambiguous at best. Following entries in the series only gives us passing mentions of what could have happened to him ^noteDouglas Cartland from Silent Hill 3 mentions he was involved in a case involving a man who went missing in Silent Hill and was never found and James' father Frank Sunderland in Silent Hill 4 claims that his son went to Silent Hill and never returned. but nothing truly concrete.
• Near the end of Sonic Forces, Eggman drags Infinite back to base and relieves him of his Phantom Ruby after he loses to the heroes for the last time, which is the last we see of him. Given the Ruby was embedded in his chest, it's unclear if removing it would kill him or not.
• Syphon Filter franchise:
  • Erikson from part 1. His life can be spared but nothing changes in the story if is killed.
  • Thomas Holman gives up information after being interrogated by Lian Xing. Gabe Logan later hears that Holman was also interrogated by his fellow agents afterwards. It is unlikely that he will be left alive given what a liability he was.
  • In the Expo Center mission, Gabe has to incapacitate a couple of military police. He also plants a bomb in the same spot. He detonates it later, and its unknown if the two MP's survived the blast.
• Tarzan: Untamed: Oswald and his crew are last seen being caught in a rush of collapsing elephant bones. It's unknown if they survived or were crushed to death.
• Both Luke fon Fabre and Asch the Bloody in Tales of the Abyss. Both of them end up in situations requiring them to perform a Heroic Sacrifice — Asch is mortally wounded while holding off an army of soldiers, while Luke releases Lorelei, a process that will result in him ceasing to be — but one of them returns to Tear in the epilogue. Fandom still debates to this day about which one of them is dead.
• Medomai in Telepath Tactics. Emma can't find her in the end, and Tarion heavily implied he planned to kill her in an earlier scene. But they Never Found the Body, so it is possible she survived.
• We Happy Few: The final DLC, "We All Fall Down", culminates in Victoria blowing up Haworth Labs. Dr. Verloc repeatedly shouts at her through the PA system as she plants bombs, and is last heard lamenting the impending destruction. It is never shown if Verloc escapes Haworth Labs before its destruction, but it is noteworthy that he has an escape pod in his office and he has ample time to get out after the bombs are planted.
• At the end of Wandersong, Audrey Redheart disappears completely after she is seen delivering the final blow to the Nightmare King. She's not even seen after that in the Playable Epilogue. When fans asked A Shell In The Pit about her fate, they responded they didn't know what happened to her either, but told fans that originally in development, Audrey was confirmedly going to die, but the amount of effects on the screen made it hard to tell what was happening. Also, the team felt like her dying would be out of place in a game like Wandersong.