Plot twists can be powerful additions to a game’s story. From Bioshock’s arc words to the impactful ending of The Last of Us, these moments can define the games they’re from and leave a lasting impression.
Sometimes though, twists can hit the player with confusing revelations that don’t fit with what was expected. While this can sometimes break a game, other times the player can just roll with it and accept it as a baffling quirk of an excellent game. Here are some examples, and naturally, these examples contain spoilers, so be warned.
10 Whatever Happens At The End Of Inside
Playdead’s titles are surreal in nature, although Limbo was reasonably easy to understand despite its dream-like nature. What was less easy to figure out was their follow-up title, Inside.
Inside stars a young boy traveling through an oppressive landscape of guards with vicious dogs, mind-controlled citizens and other hazards. Then at the final destination the boy becomes one with a mass of flesh and limbs, then breaks out of the facility it’s contained in. It’s not clear what happened there, but it’s a moment that’s created endless debate about its meaning, and added an extra layer to the game’s already surreal feeling.
9 El Dorado Is Not A Fabled City Of Gold (Uncharted)
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortuneis a light-hearted adventure game starring the charming and roguish Nathan Drake. He and his band of misfit friends venture into lost lands on the search for treasure while battle pirates. Nothing too unusual here.
However, in the last third of the game, the game takes a sudden turn into horror. The treasure they’re looking for is cursed and has created a bunch of zombie creatures, and now they’re hunting everyone down. It’s a dramatic shift in tone that can catch players off guard, and yet the final part of the game becomes a tense and exciting conclusion that players love.
8 The Real Threat (Until Dawn)
Similar to the previous entry, this twist involves the reveal of an unexpected supernatural entity. Although in Until Dawn, a horror game, this is because the game sets up a standard serial killer narrative in its early chapters, although it becomes clear that the killer may not be as scary as expected.
The real threat here comes from the existence of wendigos on the mountain, aggressive supernatural beings with a love of decapitation. This leads to the final moments of the game being even more terrifying, although you do have to look past the fact that this twist ignores how little of an issue they were in previous visits to the cabin prior to the game.
7 Wesker Is Alive (Resident Evil Code Veronica)
This is kind of a double twist, as the original Resident Evil revealed your squad leader, Albert Wesker, as a double agent working for the sinister Umbrella Corporation all along. He gets a karmic death at the hands of Umbrella’s Tyrant bioweapon and then the mansion and its laboratories are blown up.
The second twist comes in Resident Evil Code Veronica, where Albert Wesker shows up alive and well, having somehow survived all of that and now sporting superpowers. It’s silly, hand-waved as the result of some undefined Umbrella experiment, but it does lead to the creation of the series’ most iconic villain and his delightfully hammy later appearance in Resident Evil 5, so it’s worth it.
6 It’s Called Final Fantasy 7 Remake For More Reasons Than One
When Final Fantasy 7 Remake was announced to an ecstatic crowd at E3 2015, the expectation was that we’d simply get to see the beloved 1997 JRPG with more realistic visuals. When the game finally released in 2020, however, Square Enix evidently had other plans for this story.
While much of the game did follow the events of the Midgar sections of Final Fantasy VII, some events change, ghostly figures representing fate try and correct it, and Sephiroth shows up early, determined to remake the story in his favor. A bizarre twist, but opens the door for the next installments in this remake trilogy to surprise us in even more new ways, which is exciting.
5 Unexpected Sci-Fi Backstory (Assassin’s Creed 2)
While the Assassin’s Creed franchise has seen a few changes over the years, the early entries laid out an unexpected direction beyond the expected historical stealth gameplay. The first game occasionally switched to the modern era where a man named Desmond Miles, one of Altair’s descendants, is viewing all the action through a device called the Animus.
This expanded in Assassin’s Creed II, with the Animus glitching out during Ezio’s jaunts around Renaissance Italy, revealing a complex history between the game’s Templar-Assassin conflict. Ultimately these glitches reveal a sci-fi backstory involving a precursor race, one of whom ends up talking directly to Desmond through Ezio. Unexpected, strange, mind-bending, and yet absolutely amazing to discover.
4 Kessler’s Identity (Infamous)
Infamous is an epic superhero game about a bike courier named Cole McGrath gaining superpowers after he’s told to deliver a mysterious package. This also leads to his home, Liberty City, being quarantined by the government, and a league of super villains rising to terrorize the citizens, led by a man named Kessler.
The game’s big twist comes during the final battle against Kessler, where he uses powers suspiciously similar to Cole himself. This is because Kessler is Cole from an alternate timeline’s future, who’s been manipulating events to reshape this timeline. A bizarre, left field twist, but one that helps set up the even better sequel that would follow.
3 The Joke Ending Is Canon, Harrowing (Drakengard/Nier)
The Nier games are known for dense plots and multiple endings that lead to further playthroughs, so it’s not surprising that another game from director Yoko Taro is full of multiple endings, some of which get a bit strange. The real surprise, however, is that the events of Nier Replicant are set up by an alternate joke ending in the seemingly unrelated title Drakengard.
Drakengard is a dark fantasy game for the PS2 set in a world of dragons, but its final ending sees the protagonists and villain disappear through a portal into modern Tokyo where they battle in a rhythm game before being shot down by fighter jets. Sounds silly, except this is the catalyst for a grim apocalyptic event that leads to the events of Nier. Nonsensical, yet incredible.
2 The Existence Of The World Of Xenoblade
There’s something about Japanese directors and bizarre world origins, as Xenoblade is also guilty of this. What’s more, this is a twist that applies to both the first and second Xenoblade games, which initially seem unconnected.
Both games reveal that their respective worlds is the result of an experiment that ran during a great galactic war in our future, during which the lead scientist was ripped into two newly created dimensions, his dark and light sides becoming gods for each, the latter being the first game’s final boss. It’s difficult to make sense of but excellent in the way it connects the games. And it’s likely this will be built on in Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
1 Every Twist in Metal Gear Solid 2
Metal Gear is a series that isn’t afraid to get a little silly at times, but Metal Gear Solid 2 is one of the high points of its silliness. It’s a game that hits the player with many twists, all of them bizarre, all of them awesome.
The game suddenly making you play as Raiden instead of Snake, Revolver Ocelot possessed by the previous game’s villain via an arm transplant and the reveal that everything is a simulation run by a sentient AI, all of this makes for a constantly baffling experience. Yet the game is still one of the best in the series and led to creator Hideo Kojima being praised as a mad genius to this day.