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Some games let you roll the credits in under ten minutes if you know exactly where to look.
WhatCulture Gaming’s “10 Genius Shortcuts To Beat Video Games Early,” published in July 2019, isn’t about cheat codes or button combos. It’s a rundown of built-in narrative dead ends, secret alternate endings, and design exploits that developers coded directly into the games themselves, letting players finish a story hours, sometimes minutes, before the credits were ever meant to roll. The video walks through ten titles, timestamped from Batman: Arkham City at 01:05 to Streets of Rage 3 at 09:33, and every single one of them was put there on purpose by the studio.
- Defeating the intentionally unwinnable Urizen boss fight in Devil May Cry 5’s prologue (02:09) triggers an instant early victory and a secret ending.
- Choosing the blue pill at the start of The Matrix: Path of Neo (02:58) halts the entire campaign and sends Neo back to his normal life.
- Playing Streets of Rage 3 on Easy (09:33) cuts the final two stages entirely, ending the game right after the level-five boss, Robot X, goes down.
Losing on Purpose Pays Off
The Batman: Arkham City entry, cued up at 01:05, is the clearest example of a shortcut hiding in plain sight. Playing as Catwoman, there’s a moment where the game gives players the option to leave Batman trapped under rubble and simply walk away with the loot. Doing so triggers a non-canonical bad ending, complete with the credits rolling backward, a joke Rocksteady built directly into the engine rather than something players stumbled into by accident.
Devil May Cry 5 pulls a similar trick with a much bigger punchline. The Urizen fight in the prologue is designed by Capcom to be unwinnable, a scripted loss meant to establish the villain’s power before the real campaign begins. Beat it anyway, and the game rewards the player with an instant victory and a secret ending most people never see, because most people are supposed to lose on the first try.
The Urizen fight in Devil May Cry 5 is designed to be lost — beat it anyway and the game hands you the credits instead.
Refusing the Story Outright
Several entries on the list work because the game gives the player a genuine choice at the very start, and picking the “wrong” one just ends things. In The Matrix: Path of Neo, cued at 02:58, taking the blue pill during the opening sequence stops the campaign cold and returns Neo to his ordinary life rather than sending him down the rabbit hole. We Happy Few, at 06:45, does the inverse version of the same trick: taking Joy during the opening office sequence makes protagonist Arthur conform on the spot, closing out the story before the dystopian survival gameplay in Wellington Wells ever kicks in.
Far Cry 5, covered at 08:34, uses the same idea to deliver one of the more talked-about “endings” in recent open-world design. Refusing to arrest cult leader Joseph Seed inside the church during the opening cutscene triggers an early standoff resolution where the sheriff simply decides to walk away, skipping the entire Hope County campaign that follows. Fans of the series’ broader universe who want the fuller Far Cry picture can check out how the franchise’s antagonists get built in the first place in the Far Cry 6 interview with Giancarlo Esposito.
Detroit, Shadow Complex, and Turning Back Early
Detroit: Become Human, timestamped at 05:00, takes a more punishing approach. Failing early quick-time events or letting key protagonists die in the opening chapters bypasses entire story arcs, sending players toward premature conclusions that skip most of the branching narrative Quantic Dream built the game around. Shadow Complex, at 06:06, is more literal about it: right at the beginning, turning protagonist Jason around and walking back to his jeep instead of infiltrating the cave triggers an immediate early getaway ending, closing the book before the Metroidvania campaign even opens up. Anyone who enjoys tracking how Batman-adjacent design choices shape a story’s ending should also look at the recent Gotham Knights gameplay breakdown for a sense of how much branching structure developers build around a single hero’s fate.
The Stanley Parable and the Joke Endings
The Stanley Parable, at 03:57, is the video’s most chaotic entry by design, since the entire game is built around narrative collapse. Defying the narrator’s prompts or exploiting environmental quirks like jumping out the window triggers multiple immediate and often deliberately funny endings, some of which last only a few seconds. Silent Hill 2, covered at 07:27, plays the same joke straighter across repeat playthroughs, with the Dog ending and the UFO ending standing as rapid, absurdist conclusions that Konami baked in purely as a reward for players who’d already finished the game the “real” way at least once. For more on games that trap or punish players in unexpected ways rather than reward them, WhatCulture’s own 10 Video Game Fates Worse Than Death covers similar territory from the opposite angle.
Streets of Rage 3 closes out the list at 09:33 with the most mechanical shortcut of the ten: selecting Easy difficulty removes the final two stages outright, so the game simply ends after the player beats Robot X, the fifth-level boss, rather than continuing on to the full ending most players never see because they never picked the hard setting in the first place.
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