3 min read

Yuppie Psycho has ~good endings, but no Good Ending

(Major spoilers for Yuppie Psycho, of course.)

Yuppie Psycho has five or six different endings. Some of them are good. None is A Good Ending.

Yuppie Psycho's endings include:

  1. Getting fired by the asshole Hugo and leaving the company and everyone in it to rot, including all your tortured mutating coworkers.
  2. Murdering a little girl, using her severed head to assume control of the company, then abducting-adopting another little magic girl
  3. Murdering a little girl, then using her severed head to assign control of the company to a spoiled rich kid.
  4. Murdering a little girl, then getting out of the company and going down with the AI Sintra.
  5. Defeating the Witch without killing the little girl, then getting out of the company and going home.
  6. Defeating the Witch without killing the little girl, but sticking around with your coworkers.

The last two of these could reasonably be called good endings. The last one is closer to the classic good ending. The two share a confrontation with Hugo where either he's beaten senseless (and dead?) or he's fired and commits suicide, depending on whether you stole the Athame from him or not.

In that scene, the little girl assumes control of the company, and something disturbing happens without the Athame. The little girl is not at her most sympathetic in this scene. She's laughing at Hugo and even continues laughing as he's punched, flies across the room, slams into a wall and possibly dies on the spot.

(As an aside, it's unclear whether this little girl is daughter of the founder Rei Sintra (returned to her original body, with Domori in the robot) or her sister Domori (freed of her snake, which has now attached to Rei the Robot). Because of that I continue calling her "the little girl.")

That makes this not A Good Ending. For A Good Ending the little girl would need to be more morally righteous. It's not that Hugo isn't a terrible person that we want to see punished; it's that he's a terrible person and she's laughing as she watches him get brained. Worse, she's laughing despite having no obvious reason to hate this man in particular. That makes this scene not a part of A Good Ending, even if what comes after is good.

This problem feeds back into the "with-Athame" version of the ending, making those versions also not A Good Ending. Does it seem like a Good Thing to put a bloodthirsty little girl like that in charge of a company of hundreds or thousands of people? People who just finished getting tortured? She's the same person in both endings — we just didn't get to see it so clearly in the "with-Athame" ending.

Murdering the little girl Domori and then going down with Sintra could reasonably be called a good ending, too. In this ending the nightmare at SintraCorp is shown clearly to be over — interestingly, no other endings show this sequence! I read that absence to say that the company's troubles need not be over in the "save Domori" endings just because you seem to have won against the Witch. Regardless, in this ending it's explicit: The company and its employees are saved.

But of course, murdering Domori makes this also not A Good Ending. What kind of Good Ending sees the protagonist make a deal with the devil and then murder a child? What the hell? That's no Good Ending.

The other endings are straightforwardly bad. Installing the spoiled rich kid Chapman as head of the company is a funny meme, but clearly not a good ending let alone A Good one. Meanwhile, installing yourself means you continue Domori's terrible situation with a new face — that is, also bad. And getting fired means everyone at the company remains in torture — bad, though I guess you could say it's good for our protagonist Brian Pasternack.

So in the end, it comes down to whether you rather see Domori dead and the employees saved, or Domori saved and the employees in an ambiguous spot. I personally like Domori saved, but I can see the other ending, too.