Gamer completes the Underground storyline in Fallout 4 for the first time after 300 hours and is stunned by the grim finale

Video games rarely punish you for winning. Usually it's the opposite: credits roll, you get a reward, your allies are happy, and there's a sense of accomplishment. So it hit one player especially hard, having decided to finish this storyline for the first time, when right after a successful raid on an enemy base, someone silently hands you a piece of paper and then asks you to burn it.

This is about the Railroad ending in Fallout 4 and the fate of Liam Binet, an Institute scientist. He's the one hiding behind the codename Patriot, secretly smuggling synths to the surface and leaking data. During the Tradecraft quest, working as a double agent inside the Institute, the Sole Survivor tracks him down and gains access to the Code Defender program – a security loophole that lets you strip synths of their programming.

Then comes the conflict the whole storyline was built around. Liam wants to smuggle out one group of thirteen synths quietly, without drawing attention, while Desdemona knows the exploit only works once and the Synth Retention Bureau will patch the hole the moment a large disappearance gets noticed. Choosing mass uprising instead means chaos, gunfire in sterile hallways, and the deaths of people Liam considered family.

After the reactor explodes and the Institute gets wiped out, Desdemona hands the Sole Survivor Patriot's note. The tone isn't grateful, it's accusatory. Liam writes plainly that he blames himself for what happened, since he's the one who trusted the player, and that he has no intention of living with it. There's no way to save him. Desdemona suggests burning the letter and never speaking of it again, and right after that comes the memorial service, where everyone pretends the victory was clean.

The only thing actually in the player's hands is the evacuation order given before the detonation. It saves part of the staff, and later you can run into random encounters with refugees around the Commonwealth wearing dirty Institute lab coats and jumpsuits. The Resettle Refugees quest, which lets you place them in a settlement, only triggers on the Minutemen ending and requires at least one unclaimed settlement, which is why plenty of longtime players have never even seen it.

There's a certain irony in the fact that the Railroad, fighting for synth rights as if they were human rights, ends up destroying the only place capable of creating synths in the first place. DiMA in Far Harbor calls it what it is: extinction of the species, just stretched out over time.

The Institute knows how to create life, the Railroad knows how to set it free, and both sides toss the paperwork into the fire just as easily.