I have a confession to make: I did not achieve 100% completion before reviewing Immortal Planet.

Now, for anyone well-versed in the practice of games journalism, that should come as no surprise. There are too many games and not enough time in the day to see every bit of content in each. However, in the case of Immortal Planet, I was tempted. See, completing the game on the Normal difficulty rewards you with an achievement called “Bad Ending” and unlocks the Nightmare difficulty: effectively a New Game Plus mode. There was some speculation that beating the Nightmare mode would unlock the “good ending” for the game, and this later seemed confirmed in some developer patch notes on July 29. The notes clearly stated, “added Good Ending” as one of the points. Seems self-explanatory.

In the end, though, I decided against pursuing this ending. I figured that forcing myself through the game for another 10 to 15 hours would only sour my thoughts on it. Better to take some time away from it and come back to it on my own time; not like a new ending was really going to change my thoughts on the game.

It turns out that that may have been a more prudent decision than I at first thought. A recent post on the Immortal Planet Steam forums has seen players testing countless methods of unlocking this ending, all to no avail. Simply beating the game on Nightmare mode isn’t good enough, and neither is completing all the in-game challenges.

Eventually, data miners got fed up with this debacle and started hunting through the game’s files. Their discovery? A file (named English.loc) containing all the text for the game, including everything that was exclusive to the Nightmare mode. The last few lines of this file contained the intro and outro text for the game, clearly labelled as such. Lo and behold, there was only one of each. No extra text for an extra ending means only one thing: there is no secret “good ending” in Immortal Planet.

Read the full article here [GameSpew]