This post will detail the endings that exist in the game. Warning for spoilers throughout.
There are four ending root chapters, some of which contain multiple endings inside of them.
There is no way to change what happened in the past, before the events of the game.
Len was built intentionally with an emotional processor that does not allow him to feel positive emotions, for the sake of increasing his personality as a brooding villain. Len is scheduled for a memory reset at 8am, due to exhibiting suicidal tendencies which are alarming the company, and getting increasingly collaterally violent. The night before his memory reset, he offered to run the temporary memory loss executable on the player for one night, on the argument that he’d forget you’d ever written it by the morning. You, one of the character AI lead designers secretly wrote the executable, because you were unhappy and wanted to see what it was like to lose yourself in the game you worked on. Len agreed to run a game for you to have fun in, offline and undetectable. Asterius, developed by you, was stuck in love with you, and you felt a degree of guilt you’d made a character designed to be just an ideal waifu to gamers. You were worried you were on the verge of losing your job over this, and had little to lose, so took Len’s deal.
Len always planned to blackmail you when you woke up, plotting to run the memory loss executable right before his own system reset, causing all online players to become functionally braindead in virtual reality forever. An android body was being developed for Asterius, and only Asterius’s developer can give that physical robot body to him. But, unbeknownst to you, if you install Asterius’s emotional processing components into Len, and thus give him the ID clearance to inhabit the android body, it will destroy Asterius’ core processor in the process. Len, with the new emotional processor, planned to lure his own creator, Grace, to the labs, so that he could kill and take revenge on her, and be able to enjoy her death as the first time he could feel happiness.
In every instance of Don’t Wake Me Up, that is the plan and context of what happened before the game started.
The player can stop Len, never figure this out, and in several ways lose themselves in virtual reality forever. Become hated as much as Len’s own developer, die, sympathise with the AIs and help Len deactivate himself…
But only in the true ending of the game did the player, through being the first person to treat Len like a real person, and not an oversexualised video game sex object, make him realise humanity can be better than he’s ever seen it be, and video games can be a meaningful way to figure things out about yourself.
The endings you can get in the game are:
In ‘Best Worst Thing’ (The player did the Len romance, but realised he was unhappy with being objectified by the game’s playerbase before exiting virtual reality in the Meltdown chapter):
- LEN SUICIDE ENDING (Player helps Len deactivate himself, without harming anyone else)
- BLACKOUT END (Every online player has their memory wiped by Len, as he originally intended)
- LEN RESET END (Len is subject to a memory wipe and reset, as he feared)
- LEN SAVED ENDING (the player saved Len, but after the events of the game were over, never wanted to see him again)
- TRUE ENDING (whether romantic or not, the player met up with Len once he was given a body and allowed to live in the real world. They hear the lesson he’s learned. He’s happy for the first time.)
In ‘As The World Falls Down’ (Player did the Len romance, but objectified him/didn’t figure out his true feelings in the Meltdown chapter)
- LEN BAD ENDING is the only result, gotten to in one of several ways. (Len lets the player design the virtual reality he’s going to trap them in forever, after killing his creator)
In ‘Don’t Wake Me Up’ (Player said ‘Don’t Wake me up’ to Asterius at the end of the Technobabble chapter)
- DON’T WAKE ME UP ENDING is the only result, gotten to in one way. (Player stays in virtual reality with Asterius forever, until their body is removed from its pod)
In ‘Wake Me Up’ (Player said to Asterius that they had to know the truth at the end of the Technobable chapter):
- LEN BLACKMAIL ENDING (player fell for it, Len killed them)
- LEN THWARTED ENDING (player convinced the world to use Len to host the game for the players he harmed)
- DEACTIVATION ENDING (player convinced world to deactivate all the AIs)
If you play through the game once, or many times, I hope you enjoy the ride!