Marvel’s Wolverine ending takes the thing the whole game has been handing back to Logan, piece by piece, and burns it. Insomniac’s PS5 exclusive launched on September 15, 2026, and its final act brings in Apocalypse, the full Phoenix Force and a price Logan pays with his own memory. Here is what happens, why it happens, and what both post-credits scenes set up.
Full story spoilers for Marvel’s Wolverine from here on.
The setup: Team X, Trask and Essex
The story picks up three years after Logan walked away from Team X, a morally grey mutant strike force led by Nathaniel Essex, voiced by Troy Baker, with Sabretooth and Mystique on the roster. Essex is the man who took Logan in when he was homeless and amnesiac. Logan comes back into the fold when industrialist Bolivar Trask starts abducting mutants with the Reavers, his cybernetically enhanced militia.
Comics readers know the name Nathaniel Essex from somewhere else: on the page, he is Mister Sinister. Here is who Mister Sinister is, if the name is new to you.
The campaign’s four major boss fights are Omega Red, the Sentinel Prototype, Lady Deathstrike and, last of all, Essex. Running underneath all of it is the game’s best idea: Logan does not know who he is, and whisky bottles found along the way give him back fragments of his past, one memory at a time.
Marvel’s Wolverine ending explained: the final fight
The climax is an arena fight against Essex and his clones. Beaten, Essex delivers a cryptic warning and spends his final moments on one last act: he transfers the consciousness of Apocalypse into Logan.
Purple energy takes over. Logan stays conscious inside his own body, but he cannot fight the thing now driving it. Nothing in Logan’s arsenal can. The only power strong enough is Jean Grey with the full Phoenix Force. She rises into the fiery Phoenix Raptor and burns Apocalypse’s control out of Logan’s mind.
What happens to Logan’s memory
The fire works, and it costs everything. Jean’s Phoenix burn destroys nearly all of Logan’s remaining memories, including their shared history. Inside the flames, in a mental space that looks like a cabin, Jean gives him one last gift before it is gone: his real name, James Logan Howlett.
That is the cruelty at the heart of the Marvel’s Wolverine ending. The whole game is about a man piecing himself back together, and everything those whisky bottles returned to him is burned away by the same act that saves him. He walks out of the final fight free, and a stranger to himself.
The epilogue: Red
The epilogue is the gentlest part of the Marvel’s Wolverine ending. Logan meets Jean on a seaside rooftop over whisky, and she gives him a carved wooden bird. He admits he does not remember their past. Before he goes, she tells him a roundabout story about a girl called Red and a boy with a cloud hanging over his head, and it gets a smile out of him.
His parting line: “I’ll see you around, Red.” Then he leaves Jean and her friends behind to go and find out who he is. Red, for anyone new to the comics, has been Wolverine’s name for Jean Grey for decades.
Post-credits scene 1: Sabretooth and War
The first post-credits scene plays automatically. Sabretooth follows Apocalypse’s voice in his head into a cave and finds a second intact Helix Engine. A tall figure with glowing eyes is waiting for him, and the line is short: “Death’s turn is over… Now is the time… For War.”
In the comics, Apocalypse is En Sabah Nur, an ancient mutant who surrounds himself with four Horsemen named for the end of the world: Famine, Pestilence, War and Death. The line means what it sounds like. Logan was Death, and Sabretooth is being made War. Wolverine has worn the Death mantle for Apocalypse in the comics before, so the game is drawing on real history here.
It also answers the question the main ending leaves hanging. Jean burned Apocalypse out of Logan, but she did not destroy him. He simply moved on to a more willing host.
Post-credits scene 2: the secret ending
The second scene is hidden. It unlocks only after finishing the game and earning at least a bronze rank on all 14 Nightmare Door trials. It flashes back 75 years, to a farm Logan and Jean once shared.
Jean explains how long this has been going on. Their relationship spans hundreds of years. She has died and been reborn more than once, “like a phoenix”, and they always find each other again. And she has done this before: long ago, she “burned Death out of him”. The scene closes with the two of them going back into the cabin together.
That changes how the Marvel’s Wolverine ending reads. What Jean does in the finale is not a first. It is a repeat of something she has already done once, which suggests she knew exactly what it would cost him, and exactly what it would cost her.
What the Marvel’s Wolverine ending sets up
Put together, the ending and the two scenes leave three threads open:
- Apocalypse is still out there. Burned out of Logan, not destroyed, and now working through Sabretooth.
- The Horsemen are assembling. Death has had its turn and War is next. Two seats are still empty.
- Logan starts again from nothing. No memories, a name he was handed, and a woman who remembers everything he has lost.
Whether Insomniac follows it up is a question for another day. But a studio does not hide a second post-credits scene behind 14 trials unless it wants players thinking about what comes next.
The reviews, and why the ending matters
Marvel’s Wolverine launched to a Metacritic score of 77 from more than 100 reviews, which reports called the lowest among PlayStation Studios’ first-party PS5 releases, and an 81 on OpenCritic. Critics praised the combat and criticised the linear structure. Eurogamer gave it 3 out of 5 and singled out Wolverine’s characterisation as the bright spot. Players have been kinder: it launched with a 4.85 out of 5 rating on the PlayStation Store.
Wherever you land on the score, the Marvel’s Wolverine ending is where that characterisation pays off. A game about a man rebuilding himself ends by taking him apart, and it lets the one person who remembers him carry the weight of it.
More Wolverine and X-Men: our Marvel’s Wolverine launch guide, the Jean Grey coming to the MCU, and the full X-Men reboot cast.
Did the ending land for you, or did it undo the whole game? Comments are open.
Sources: All Things How, Kotaku, GodisaGeek, TheGamer. Marvel’s Wolverine is developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment; all rights belong to their owners.
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