All Four Endings — Exact Route Conditions

Helping Your Boyfriend has four endings, and it will not tell you which one you earned or how to get a different one. There is no good ending badge, no bad ending badge, no scorecard at the credits. You get a title card, a short scene, a screen with the creator names on it, and then you are back at the top of a script that runs a little over 8,000 words in English.

That refusal to rank is deliberate, and it is the first thing to understand before planning a route. The creators put the game into the Spooktober 8th Annual Visual Novel Jam, and the thing this story is actually about — a doctor who is unfailingly kind to you in exactly the same specific way every time — does not sit neatly inside a good/bad hierarchy. The stated rule is that there is no official good or bad ending classification, and that the four outcomes split along three axes: how much you trust Adrian, how much you trust Ian, and whether you ever get out of the house.

Community advice about this game usually reduces to one line: keep Adrian's affection low. That is directionally right and mechanically incomplete. Low approval does close the searching branch, but no ending in the game is decided by Adrian's meter. The real mechanism is two separate meters — Adrian's approval and Ian's affection — plus a set of story flags recording what you physically did. Adrian's number only ever gates a branch; the numbers that decide endings are Ian's, and the switch that decides them is whether you gave Ian the address.

This guide is mostly about the third axis, with the first two as instruments. Once you can see how the split works, the endings stop feeling like a dice roll.

Four endings, no scoreboard

There are four, and they fall into two pairs. Endings 01 and 02 are the two you get by staying inside the machine. Endings 03 and 04 are the two you get by getting out of it. That split is the first thing to internalise, because two of the four are not really about escaping Adrian at all — one of them is the trap.

Read the last column again, because that is where most players get it wrong. The first two endings are decided almost entirely by what you did not do: never leave the house and swallow the medication for Ending 01, leave and then fail to give Ian the address for Ending 02. Endings 03 and 04 require the opposite of all of it — get out, and tell Ian the one piece of information he has been asking for.

There is a second, quieter axis running through the escape pair: both endings share the same hospital room three months later, and the only thing that changes is who is still in your life.

Two meters and a set of flags

Underneath the pastel surfaces the game runs on two independent relationship meters and a long list of boolean story flags. The meters are numbers that move a step or two at a time; the flags are switches that record what you physically did. Confusing the two is the most common reason a run that “should” have reached an ending does not.

Adrian's approval — adrianRelation

Every dialogue choice you make moves Adrian's approval and affection up or down. Warm answers add to it, up to +2 at a time. Cold or resistant answers subtract from it, down to -2. The value is not cosmetic. It decides whether Adrian hands over the medication in good spirits, and it gates one specific branch of the script: in StoryGame/Searching, the check adrianRelation > -3 routes to the #NoSearch label, which blocks the searching branch entirely. Low approval closes that door for good, and no ending in the game is decided by Adrian's meter — the only meter with a real ending threshold is Ian's.

Ian's affection — ianRelation

Ian has two thresholds and they are nowhere near each other, which is what surprises people. ianRelation > 14 unlocks IanRoute1, the first half of his route, with its own #FreeTime and #FlowerShop branches. ianRelation >= 40 unlocks IanRoute2, the second half, and IanRoute2 is the only route in the entire game that leads to Ending 04.

That is a band of twenty-five points, and because choices move the meter by small amounts, you cannot stumble into 40 by accident. It has to be built, deliberately, across the run.

The flags that decide the rest

These are the switches worth knowing by name, because they are what you are actually steering when you are steering an ending:

• wentOutside — you left the house at least once. Its absence is what keeps you on the Adrian route.
• tookPill — you swallowed Ian's pill on the first night.
• spatPill — you spat the pill out.
• sawParcel — you found the parcel Adrian brings home. This is where the address comes from.
• hasKey — you are holding the key to the locked room.
• secretRoomVisited — you have been inside the secret room behind the locked door.
• toldAddress — you gave Ian the address of the safe place. The escape door opens on this flag.
• phoneTried, phoneCorrect, phoneLeave, oliverCallDropped — the four branches of the phone minigame, played after the escape.
• madeup — you made up an excuse about where you were.
• useKnife — you used the knife. Day3_Act2 routes to StoryGame/Attack1 when this is true, and to ICanFixHim when it is false.
• g_clearedOnce — set after any ending is reached. It marks that you have cleared the game once, and it is the closest thing the game has to an ending counter.

Flags are also checked in a fixed order. In StoryGame/LockingDoor2: clickedLivingDoor sends you to #Exit; hasKey sends you to #KeyDoor; otherwise you fall into #ClickLoop; secretRoomVisited opens #KeyDoorOpen and leads into StoryGame/PhoneOutside1; and then the final test — toldAddress routes to StoryGame/Outside2, and without it the game goes to StoryGame/Outside1. Outside1 is Ending 02. Outside2 is where Endings 03 and 04 live.

Ending 01 — My boyfriend is the best

Read that ending text again. The reward is a newspaper clipping about the man, not about you. You are not in the write-up at all. Adrian's private life comes back as a locked room he declines to discuss, and the framing works hard to let you read the modesty as evidence of goodness.

Ending 02 — The cage

This is the ending you get for almost escaping. You found the key, you got past the locked door, you made it outside, and then the escape sequence asked you for one piece of information you did not hand over.

Ian does not attack you. He does something worse: he tells you the truth. There is nowhere else that is safe except that house, exactly as Adrian told you, and he calls you a fool for believing anything else. The logic is sound. The premise is the trap. Adrian said it to keep you inside; Ian says it in the rain to keep you there.

You go back inside with him. The cage was never the locked room. It is the correct-sounding sentence.

The one flag that splits Ending 03 and 04

If you take one technical detail away from this page, take this one. Endings 03 and 04 are separated by exactly two conditions, and only one of them is a flag.

The flag is toldAddress — you gave Ian the address of the safe place. Both escape endings require it, so on its own it does not separate 03 from 04. It separates the escape pair from Ending 02. The thing that actually separates 03 from 04 is a number: ianRelation >= 40.

Both of Ian's thresholds matter, and they do different jobs. ianRelation > 14 unlocks IanRoute1, the first half of his route, with its #FreeTime and #FlowerShop branches — that is where you actually build the relationship and learn his history. ianRelation >= 40 unlocks IanRoute2, which is the route to Ending 04. Below 40, the same stretch of story sends you to StoryGame/Police1 instead.

Twenty-five points is a lot to move in a script this short, which is why people who “did everything right” keep landing in Ending 03. It is not a bug: the game considers Ian a person you have to earn, not a button you press.

Why Ending 01 is not a “good” ending

Plenty of players reach Ending 01, see a smiling doctor and a public award, and file it as the cheerful outcome. It is not. Nothing in the game labels it good, and the game's own rule is that there is no good or bad classification at all. The horror of this ending is that the story ends before the horror does.

There is a mechanical reason too, and it is blunt: Ending 01 is the ending you reach by doing nothing. You never left the house. You took the medication Adrian gave you. You kept his approval high enough that he was pleased with you. None of those are heroic acts. They are the absence of acts, and the game builds them as the path of least resistance precisely because the premise is that Adrian is safe and attentive and wants to look after you.

And look at the ending's own content again. The award is for medical innovation and diagnostics — a man publicly brilliant at the thing he does at Valleybrook Hospital, with you in his spare room taking apart old dolls. The note about being a bachelor who declined to discuss his personal life is not a throwaway line: it is the game's quiet admission that a personal life exists, and that it is not the one you were part of. The secret room exists, the locked door exists, and in Ending 01 you are still inside the house.

So the horror of Ending 01 is structural rather than visual. You get a title card, a newspaper, a cursor, and no explanation of what the doll job was for, what is behind the locked door, or why a man who claims to want nothing but his work keeps an assistant in his bedroom. Ending 01 is not a reward for trusting Adrian. It is the game's way of closing the file while the case is still open.

Why Ending 02 returns you to the cage

Ending 02 has a reputation as “the bad escape”, and that is worth correcting, because it is the most thematically interesting of the four.

Compare the two ways this game can fail to free you. In Ending 01 you never try. In Ending 02 you try, you nearly succeed, and you are talked back out of it by a man whose argument is factually correct. Adrian lied about the reasons and was right about the fact. Ian says the same sentence in the rain, lying about the reasons and right about the fact. That symmetry is the point.

The game is not asking you to tell a liar from a truth-teller. Ian is Adrian's younger brother, and the whole point of him is that he learned the family method from Adrian. It is exactly what the game says about him in the Ian route: he wanted to give the prey some hope, gain their trust, and then stab them in the back, because he was copying his brother the whole time.

So when Ian says there is nowhere else that is safe except that house, he is not arguing from kindness. He is reciting a template. Ending 02 is what happens when you accept the template's conclusion and throw away its reasoning. You agree with Adrian's sentence while rejecting Adrian, and you walk back into the cage with the door still unlocked.

Which is why the ending is called The cage and not The escape. You got out. You did not get free. And you did it with the key still in your pocket.

Ending 03 and Ending 04, side by side

Both escape endings use the same three-months-later frame, the same hospital room, the same police raid and the same unanswered figure in the crowd. The divergence happens in the middle, in a scene named Police1 versus Police2, and the only thing that differs is what happened to Ian before the police showed up.

Read the difference as a story about trust rather than as a morality scale. In Ending 03 you are free and alone: Ian is missing with no known whereabouts, the house yields nothing but bloodstains, and the only person who keeps showing up is Oliver, who had been parked in the alley by Adrian's house, patrolling day and night because he suspected Adrian. The hospital room is full of people and you are the only one in it with nothing to wait for — the door is open, the room is fine, and there is nobody in it with you. Adrian is still missing in both endings, the figure in the crowd is in both, and you say nothing in both. Whatever you chose, and whoever you chose it with, the thing on the other side of the window does not change. Ending 04 is not the good ending. It is the only ending where somebody is still talking to you.

How to hit each ending in one run

Each ending needs its own run, because the decision points are spread across all three days and both meters move in small steps. Here is the shortest reliable path for each, written as decisions rather than as a list of answers to look up.

Ending 01 — My boyfriend is the best

• Never leave the house. wentOutside must stay false for the entire run.
• Accept the medication Adrian hands you at Day2Evening. The scene routes to StoryGame/Midnight2 and then Day3_ED1.
• Keep adrianRelation high. Warm answers add up to +2 each, cold answers subtract up to -2. Keep it above -3 so the searching branch stays open in case you change your mind.
• Do not pick a fight with the knife. In Day3_Act2, useKnife routes to StoryGame/Attack1; taking the other path leads to ICanFixHim.

Ending 02 — The cage

• Get out of the house. That means hasKey, the locked door, and secretRoomVisited for the secret room behind it.
• Make the phone call. Two digits of a phone number are written in ink on your arm and fade over time, but you remember two of them, and you need them to dial Oliver. The phone screen branches on phoneTried, phoneCorrect, phoneLeave and oliverCallDropped.
• Do not give Ian the address. This is the only requirement. Leaving toldAddress unset routes LockingDoor2 to StoryGame/Outside1, and Ian walks you back in.

Ending 03 — The Empty Cage

• Do everything from Ending 02, but tell Ian the address. toldAddress set sends LockingDoor2 to StoryGame/Outside2.
• Keep ianRelation under 40. Anything below 40 lands you in StoryGame/Police1.
• You do not need IanRoute1. ianRelation > 14 unlocks his route, but Ending 03 does not require it. Low is fine.

Ending 04 — Moving Forward

• Set toldAddress exactly as in Ending 03. Without it there is no Ending 04 to reach.
• Build ianRelation to 40 or higher. This is the only difference between the two escape endings, and it is the hard one.
• Use IanRoute1 to do it. ianRelation > 14 unlocks the #FreeTime and #FlowerShop branches, which is where his history and the flower shop dream live. Answer him warmly and often.
• Check the number before you leave the house. ianRelation >= 40 unlocks IanRoute2, and IanRoute2 is the only path to StoryGame/Police2.

Two practical notes. First, g_clearedOnce is set after any ending is reached, so that is the flag to look at if you want to know whether a run counted. Second, you can see the difference between Ending 02 and Ending 03 on the screen in the rain, and the difference between 03 and 04 only in the number attached to ianRelation. If you keep landing on The Empty Cage, the answer is almost always that you need twenty-five more points of Ian.

Frequently asked questions