Zarf Updates: Prince of Persia (2008) -- legacy?
For what it's worth, I did try jumping off a cliff when I played it. The game doesn't let you. All the cliffs develop invisible barriers just for the ending.
Not everything you do in Universal Paperclips is awful. Towards the beginning, you do things like cure cancer and introduce other beneficial technologies. Sure, you have an ulterior motive (where "you" means the player character), but you could in theory play up to that point and stop. But you (the player) don't, because you want to see the story, and that's clearly not how the story goes. It would be as illegitimate as refusing to cooperate with PoP's ending, or rejoining the party early in A Change in the Weather.
Also, Donut County basically does a PoP08 ending (using game mechanics to cause the player to choose to do something bad), but it's at the very beginning.
Of course, an equally valid reading of Soma is that you get the good ending. The bad ending is for somebody else who shares your memories. That is the paradox the game wants to tickle our minds with.
I should have thought of Trinity! I've always thought that it failed to hold together as an ending, but it was certainly trying something in this area.
Donut Country is, as you say, a similar trick at the beginning. Excellent point. I guess that's a third category of use -- distinct from "in the middle" horror games, and "at the end" PoP 2008.
> All the cliffs develop invisible barriers just for the ending.
It wouldn't necessarily be suicide, now that I think about it. The Temple plain has one cliff-edge that overlooks the "outside world". It would take a very small change to provide a gauntlet-grind track down the cliff face. Fade to black partway down and you've got a perfectly functional "go home" ending choice.
As for Soma, I think it's just a misstep that the ending is ambiguous in that way. As I said in my post, they should have distanced the final cut-scene in some way to make it clear that it wasn't you.
Gauntlet IV had an RPG mode. You explore 5 castles, each with 10 floors, and the last floor of each castle has a boss fight with a dragon. You can complete the first 4 castles in any order, but you need to defeat the first 4 dragons before you can enter the fifth castle.
This wasn't a narrative game in any sense, but it had a premise given to you in text at the start. It was a pretty tired trope: There are 5 mysterious castles, presumably filled with untold dangers, but also untold treasures! Many heroes have entered, but none have ever returned! Will you be the first to succeed where others have failed?
So you play through the game, and finally have the boss fight with the final dragon. As he dies, he thanks you for releasing him from the curse he interited, which is now being passed onto you.
You then get one final short piece of gameplay, in which you are still in the same room, except you are now controlling a dragon. An adventurer approaches, and you are able to use breath attacks to fry him until he is dead. Then the game ends.
Totally blew my frickin' mind at the time.
Nifty. The ending of Shadow of the Colossus touches on this idea too.
Sorry to be off-topic (again) but I think this is interesting: as I understand it, Soma's ending is not really ambiguous. The point is that the entire question of whether it is "you" or somebody else that get the happy ending is meaningless. If the mind of person A can be copied, then every copy can claim to be the "real" A, and they will all be right. Philosophers such as Derek Parfit have written thousands of pages on this subject, and it seems obvious to me that Soma is at least in part inspired by this philosophical debate.
Sure, we agree about this. But Soma consistently offers you a single viewpoint at any given time; it never switches between two live copies or gives you the option of which to play. The whole impact of the ending is muted if you take the post-credits scene as "I experienced this". They should have picked one, and since this is a horror game -- philosophical horror -- there's no question which they should have stuck with.
Undertale winds up being like this since most players saved the genocide ending for last. Even if they didn't, completing the game that way stays with you. Literally; it brands your hard drive so that the game always remembers, even if you reinstall.
Life Is Strange does this (yes, there’s a choice at the end, but it’s fairly obvious which choice the writers preferred).