From The Usual Suspects to Oldboy (the Korean original, obviously) and everything in between, there is certainly no shortage of classic movies that boast some truly jaw-dropping twists that upend everything you thought you knew. The same also happens to be true of narratives in video games, as there are a whole heap of absolutely legendary titles that have plot twists that have woven themselves into the very fabric of video game discourse for years and sometimes decades after release. Without further ado, here are some of the best plot twists in video games.
Oh and just to be clear, though many of these games are a little on the vintage side, some seriously *major* spoilers lurk within all the same. You have been warned.
BioShock
After casting players as the enigmatic ‘Jack’ and putting them through a fairly traumatic, watery plane crash, 2K Boston’s first-person shooter adventure wastes little time in thrusting those same players into the depths of Rapture, a failed utopian city at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean created by eccentric business magnate Andrew Ryan. Seemingly alone, apart from the voice of mysterious freedom fighter ‘Atlas’ in your ear, BioShock sees the player used as a pawn of sorts between Atlas and the nefarious Andrew Ryan, who has overseen the fall of Rapture and the violent, biologically engineered madness of its many citizens which followed.
Throughout the game, BioShock has the player continually being instructed and directed by Atlas to complete various objectives and tasks – often prefaced by the seemingly harmless polite preamble of “Would you, kindly?”. Well, as it turns out this is a subconscious trigger phrase that Rapture’s thought-to-be-long-dead premier gangster – Fontaine – has been using under his guise as Atlas to force Jack to carry out his plans. After nearly twenty hours of play, having the guy that guided you through thick and thin and provided you with a friendly, encouraging voice where none existed, only to be outed as the primary antagonist of the whole thing was an utter masterstroke and one that still resonates even today.
Dead Space
Arriving at the spaceship USG Ishimura, engineer Isaac Clarke is tasked with boarding the vessel to discover what has happened to his partner Nicole Brennan and why the ship’s systems have gone radio silent. As it turns out, the crew has been murdered and turned into Necromorphs – terrifying sharp-limbed reanimated corpses that just want to murder and spread their contagion to anything they can find. Holding onto the increasingly desperate video and audio messages from his wayward partner, Isaac eventually comes to realise that Nicole would never have been found alive as she had committed suicide to prevent herself from turning into a Necromorph. Dead Space ends with a mentally wrecked Isaac being attacked by a horrific hallucination of Nicole. This one still hits home.
Final Fantasy VII
Oh boy, where to start with this one? Let’s start with Final Fantasy VII’s big bad Sephiroth who believed that his conception was the result of the alien deity Jenova, but it’s actually revealed that his parents are none other than the amoral Professor Hojo and Lucrecia Crescent, the wayward love of the endlessly cheerful Vincent Valentine. A tad awkward, methinks.
Elsewhere, for much of the time that Sephiroth speaks and interacts with the primary protagonist Cloud, he makes our spiky-haired hero believe that he is nothing more than a clone of Sephiroth himself. It’s only as Square-Enix’s landmark JRPG begins to march toward its conclusion that we discover Cloud isn’t a clone of Sephiroth, but rather has a deeply fractured psyche which makes him vulnerable to both Hojo and Sephiroth’s assertions. So yeah, it’s a whole thing.
Halo: Combat Evolved
In Halo: Combat Evolved players assume the mantle of the Master Chief, a nearly seven-foot-tall enhanced soldier driven to a single, destructive purpose – the eradication of the murderously zealous alliance of alien races known as the Covenant. And that’s pretty much what you spend more than half of the game doing as you blow up Grunts (tagging them with plasma grenades and watching them run about in a mad panic never gets old), destroy Elites and lay waste to hulking Hunters in increasingly large numbers.
It’s during the ‘Guilty Spark 343’ mission, however, that everything gets turned upside down with the introduction of the Flood, an aggressive parasitic life form that intends to infect, corrupt and kill humans and Covenant alike. As such, Halo: Combat Evolved feels very much like a game of two halves in this sense and the reveal of the Flood as ultimately the primary antagonist of the whole affair was quite the shock when we played Halo: Combat Evolved for the first time nearly quarter of a century ago.
Halo 2
Dovetailing straight into the revelation of the Flood as the new big baddies in Halo: Combat Evolved, 2004’s Halo 2 seemingly once more centres on the Master Chief as the primary protagonist, this time pitting players up against not just the Flood, but also the newly revealed and divergent Brute wing of the Covenant, too. Where Halo 2 shifts things quite substantially from its predecessor, however, is that just before the halfway mark, Bungie’s shooter sequel puts players into the alien boots of the ‘Arbiter’, a disgraced Covenant Elite tasked with retrieving the Guilty Spark and destroying both humankind and Flood alike.
Soon, the Arbiter and Master Chief realise that they have a common enemy in both the Flood and the overzealous Covenant Brutes and set about ensuring the downfall of both antagonists in earnest. To say that nobody expected to play as a Covenant Elite in a Halo game back in 2004, let alone one that would be a given dual-protagonist status with the Master Chief himself, would be quite the understatement indeed.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Arguably defining the face of ‘new stealth’ in the late 1990s, Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid very much made a gaming icon out of the main protagonist Solid Snake almost overnight. So imagine the surprise when the highly anticipated sequel, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, was unleashed on store shelves in 2001 and performed one of the industry’s most infamous bait and switches, by sidelining the extremely popular Solid Snake extremely early on with the unknown – and back then markedly less cool/interesting – Raiden for much of the game.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Set thousands of years before the events chronicled in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic ably fulfils that long-held fan dream of wanting to have the freewheeling agency that comes with stepping into the shoes of a Jedi Knight or a Sith Lord in a massive non-linear, multi-planet spanning RPG. With the player and their companions sent to destroy Darth Malak, it soon turns out that the player character is none other than an amnesic Darth Revan, the former master of Darth Malak and an extremely powerful Sith Lord in their own right. As plot twists go, this was an absolute doozy as it made you analyse every choice you had made right up until that point. A proper all-timer as far as video game plot twists go.
The Last of Us Part I
Starting with their initially borderline-hostile interactions in Naughty Dog’s seminal post-apocalyptic survival horror, The Last of Us Part I beautifully depicts the maturing relationship between Joel and Ellie as it flourishes throughout all four seasons. As they travel across post-apocalyptic North America, they seek to use Ellie’s immunity as a means to create a cure for the Cordyceps infection that has decimated humanity. With main protagonist Joel tragically losing his daughter during the game’s opening act, we’re provided with a foreshadowing of Joel’s state of mind and more importantly, the massive, daughter-shaped hole that lay in his heart that is slowly being filled as the pair inch towards the base of the rebellious Firefly faction that could synthesise a cure.
So, when Joel and Ellie finally reach the Firefly hospital base in Salt Lake City and Joel learns that Ellie won’t survive the operation to create a cure for the Cordyceps virus, well, he goes off on one. In a real ‘Are we the baddies?’ moment, The Last of Us Part I has the player embark on a wholesale slaughter of just about everyone in the Firefly base – including Marlene, the regional leader of the Fireflies who tasked Joel to escort Ellie across the country in the first place. Perhaps worse still, Joel can’t confront his deeds (or the original trauma) in the aftermath and subsequently lies to Ellie when she questions him and says that her blood simply wasn’t viable for a cure for the Cordyceps infection. This was a massive, emotional gut-punch which entirely reframed how we perceived Joel as the primary protagonist of The Last of Us and more importantly, made us look into our hearts and minds, forcing us to confront the question of whether or not we would do the same thing in his situation.
