Marvel’s Wolverine leaves several threads open for a possible sequel, and in typical Marvel fashion, its most direct line is found after the credits roll. If you’re unfamiliar with X-Men storylines or are maybe a little confused by Insomniac’s spin on some classic Logan lore, you might be wondering what the post-credits scene is gesturing at. Well, here’s a quick breakdown of how the game remixes X-Men character backstories to carve out space for the next game.
The game has two post-credits scenes, though while the first will show up for all players, the second you’ll have to actually put in a little work to see. In the first, we see Sabretooth uncovering what appears to be another Helix Engine, a device which has been used throughout the game to activate dormant mutants. This one seems to still be intact, unlike the one that is rebuilt and used over the course of the game. He does this because he has followed the voice of Apocalypse, which has been stuck in his head since he used the Helix Engine himself.
Though Apocalypse’s voice is heard throughout Wolverine, the game doesn’t really go out of its way to explain it very well. Apocalypse, or En Sabah Nur, is a long-time villain in the X-Men series, born in Egypt centuries before any of the heroes we meet in Wolverine and long believed to be one of the world’s first mutants. He is also known as one of the most powerful villains in all of Marvel, capable of changing his molecular structure as well as possessing superhuman strength and incredible psychic power.
Part of Apocalypse’s whole deal is that he is followed by “four horsemen,” a reference to the biblical concept of four individuals who represent the end of days, with each standing for one of Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence. The members of this group have varied over different iterations, with one of the more well-known rosters being the Fox films’ quartet of Storm, Psylocke, Archangel, and Magneto. It looks like Sabretooth is among them in the timeline of Marvel’s Wolverine, though it’s unclear who the other three are at this time. They could conceivably be anyone in the Marvel universe, so we’ll see who Insomniac brings out of the shadows for this version. Logan was revealed to be the Horseman of Death at one point in his long life, which he regains memories of throughout the game, and nearly took on that mantle once more before Jean burned Apocalypse’s influence out of his mind along with most of his other memories.
The second post-credits scene is only viewable after you’ve completed the game and received at least a bronze rank on every Nightmare Door trial. Here, we see Logan 75 years prior to the game’s main story, walking through the farm where he and Jean once lived. She tells the full story of how she and Logan met hundreds of years ago and she first burned Death from his psyche. Since then, she’s died and been reborn multiple times like a phoenix, and the two have always managed to find each other again. The flashback ends with the two of them joining each other in the cabin, one of the few happy memories they have left from their many lives together.
Logan’s memory has been wiped at the end of Wolverine, so he leaves Jean and her friends to find himself and hopefully restore at least some part of who he once was. We’ll see how that pans out if the game does well and Insomniac makes a sequel down the line.