The thing about the MGS twist was that it felt like they had their game ready and then added that twist on top.
It didn't ring true to me when it happened in MGS because Snake knew Master many years prior, so how could he have been fooled so easily, and then again you were mostly taking orders from the colonel so it's not like it was Master who led you anywhere. On top of that the twist itself doesn't change the second playthrough, where in a well crafted experience you would be able to see obvious clues forecasting the reveal that you saw differently this time because you knew the truth.
Bioshock is more akin to Spec Ops in how it plays with the concept that we openly trust every character in a videogame that we just met, when we should really question the motives even
of the main character which in both games ends up being someone different than what they lead you to believe.
On top of that, the second playthrough changes everything and you can see how the game was warning you all along, and yet you still fell for the trap.
If the Phantom was impersonating Fulbright, that most likely means he killed the real Fulbright who is stated in the game to be dead. If the real Fulbright was anything like the Phantom portrayed him, it makes me sad to think a character like that getting killed and no one ever knowing :c
Finding out who Illecebra was and who Magusar was and everything that happened was deeply moving and disturbing. The Japanese narration really just sealed the deal.
The twist is so dramatic that the game almost changes genre. First you think you are playing a puzzle game with no plot but then you realize this is an actual world with a story and you are trapped in it. Its as if you were playing Tetris and then suddenly you are at the top where the pieces are falling and you see a huge factory behind the scenes that produces the pieces and you have to explore it to find the meaning of all this.
Edit: now that i think of it its not disturbing, its just a twist
Yeah if anything I'd say this is an awesome plot twist. The revelation that
you are just one of many test subjects in a long series of experiments that has being on for god knows how long killing god knows how many is more disturbing. That and the fact that you have to give up companion cube.
.
I'll agree the ending of Klonoa was f'd up for what is essentially a kids platform game.
The reality of what really happens at the end of Link's Awakening is sort of disturbing, at least when you think about what it means for everyone in the world.
Finally I'll throw in all the peripheral content of YEAR WALK and when you finally return to the game with the code and find out
Among many, many fucked up things in that game (read:every goddamn moment that isn't a buildup to make you cry like a baby):
After you beat the game, you realize what shades are - human souls. You know those small shades you've been killing all this time? The ones that drop coloring books? I'll let you take a guess as to what they are.
Don't get it? That's alright. I'll spoil you. Those are children you are killing. You are murdering the souls of children every time you kill those tiny versions of shades. And this realization isn't done in a grandiose way. It just punches you in the face.
The twist is so dramatic that the game almost changes genre. First you think you are playing a puzzle game with no plot but then you realize this is an actual world with a story and you are trapped in it. Its as if you were playing Tetris and then suddenly you are at the top where the pieces are falling and you see a huge factory behind the scenes that produces the pieces and you have to explore it to find the meaning of all this.
Edit: now that i think of it its not disturbing, its just a twist
The Deku Butler's (probably infant) son died a terrible lonely dead and there is nothing you can do to make it better in any way, the game still decides to show you the cruel end of that arc.
This thread made me realize gaming sure does suck in this regard.
5 pages of all over the page answers. Definitely makes me realize we need more stuff in this sort of tone.
All of these Silent Hill 2/3 answers make me depressed. It is not that difficult Konami, start with hiring a good writer and let's get started on a Silent Hill worthy of 2/3.
This thread made me realize gaming sure does suck in this regard.
5 pages of all over the page answers. Definitely makes me realize we need more stuff in this sort of tone.
You and your city have finally assembled a space rocket to embark on a discovery as to what's causing the increasingly more violent earthquakes in your world, after there being no more threats from opposing kings. Turns out said tremors were the doings of evil giant rats (from your point of view), and they simply toss (or eat, I forgot which) your character's significant other that you've confessed to a mere few minutes prior. Then the game simply ends after you defeat the rats, when it's revealed you were nothing but a part of a real kid's toybox. No saving the princess afterwards; no happy ending for her period.
It's nothing truly horrifying even with the Little King's Story's underlying themes, but I thought it was a bummer that
your bride-to-be was quickly discarded after spending a lot of time woeing her and left to her own fate in unknown territory after having saved her from another king
, considering the game is rather cheerful on a superficial level. Maybe this would've been a plot point for a sequel since this was a game the lead designer conceptualized for years as his dream project, but unfortunately there's no chance of this ever happening anymore.
One of the messages you find in the real world attic, is that the characters in the playbox are parodies of real people he has seen. The entire game inside the toy world is then framed to be the imagination of a lonely kid. He invented his own world where he is praised and loved. What makes it sad that your heroic court knight was your recently deceased grandfather. For a lonely kid, who had to imagine being friends with others, the loss of a family member meant he just had one less person in his life that cared for him.
Among many, many fucked up things in that game (read:every goddamn moment that isn't a buildup to make you cry like a baby):
After you beat the game, you realize what shades are - human souls. You know those small shades you've been killing all this time? The ones that drop coloring books? I'll let you take a guess as to what they are.
Don't get it? That's alright. I'll spoil you. Those are children you are killing. You are murdering the souls of children every time you kill those tiny versions of shades. And this realization isn't done in a grandiose way. It just punches you in the face.
This one is the one that hit me the most, and the game that I immediately thought of when I read the OP.
The second time you play NieR is absolutely devastating. The colouring books is a great example, but not all of them are as subtle. The events play out the same way, but the newfound perspective really makes these events hit hard. The already crazy sad wedding scene only got sadder, when you see that the wolves didn't instigate anything, and only wanted revenge for the acts of the humans.
You get to see a town that tries to live peacefully with the shades. These people saw the shades are their friends, neighbours and family. Then you barge in and you commit what is basically an ethnic cleansing. You can't understand what they say and dismiss the ramblings of the humans. It's really gross.
Even worse was seeing the story of the robot and child Shade develop. When you fight them for the first time, you don't even consider that the pairing is a little weird. The game shows how they meet, become friends, have dreams and aspirations of a future together. You then promptly butt in and wreck both of them. When you play it for the first time around, you also are lead to believe that the duo caused the death of the older junkyard brother. You then get to find out that it was actually the younger brother's carelessness that cost him his life. The kid shifted the blame to the robot and ended up getting driven insane. The innocent duo got slayed and also blamed for things they didn't do.
The thing that wrecked me the most though was seeing the Shadow Lord burst out in tears though. It's a very short scene, but it was incredibly powerful. Not only did you get confronted again with the fact that you kind of messed things up for humanity again, you see the person whom you assumed was the villain cry over his failure to stop you. Many onions were cut during NieR.
This isn't a traditional ending per se but there was a revelation in Silent Hill 3 that was deliberately done to play on your mind I guess.
Vincent is talking to Heather and she mentions how there's heaps of monsters around (of which the player has murdered countless amounts of in public settings like a shopping mall and streets up until that point) and Vincent replies with a rather mortified tone: -
"Monsters? They look like monsters to you?"
But then when he sees Heather visibly upset (and thus a threat to his plan) he tacks on'
"Don't worry. It's just a joke!"
I know it probably was just a joke, but the delivery and the acting in that scene really hammered it home for me. It made me question everything I'd done up until that point.
One of the messages you find in the real world attic, is that the characters in the playbox are parodies of real people he has seen. The entire game inside the toy world is then framed to be the imagination of a lonely kid. He invented his own world where he is praised and loved. What makes it sad that your heroic court knight was your recently deceased grandfather. For a lonely kid, who had to imagine being friends with others, the loss of a family member meant he just had one less person in his life that cared for him.
Damn, I knew I felt a bit sad after I finished LKS, but never though about it this way. Very beautiful game, too bad we will never seen anything like that again.
This one is the one that hit me the most, and the game that I immediately thought of when I read the OP.
The second time you play NieR is absolutely devastating. The colouring books is a great example, but not all of them are as subtle. The events play out the same way, but the newfound perspective really makes these events hit hard. The already crazy sad wedding scene only got sadder, when you see that the wolves didn't instigate anything, and only wanted revenge for the acts of the humans.
You get to see a town that tries to live peacefully with the shades. These people saw the shades are their friends, neighbours and family. Then you barge in and you commit what is basically an ethnic cleansing. You can't understand what they say and dismiss the ramblings of the humans. It's really gross.
Even worse was seeing the story of the robot and child Shade develop. When you fight them for the first time, you don't even consider that the pairing is a little weird. The game shows how they meet, become friends, have dreams and aspirations of a future together. You then promptly butt in and wreck both of them. When you play it for the first time around, you also are lead to believe that the duo caused the death of the older junkyard brother. You then get to find out that it was actually the younger brother's carelessness that cost him his life. The kid shifted the blame to the robot and ended up getting driven insane. The innocent duo got slayed and also blamed for things they didn't do.
The thing that wrecked me the most though was seeing the Shadow Lord burst out in tears though. It's a very short scene, but it was incredibly powerful. Not only did you get confronted again with the fact that you kind of messed things up for humanity again, you see the person whom you assumed was the villain cry over his failure to stop you. Many onions were cut during NieR.
Exactly! This man's expression is one of someone whom has experienced something incredibly weak, much like SS2's story telling (compared to Bioshock's ).
Considering how similar the plots between SS2 and Bioshock are, and how they even use the same kind of devices (left behind journals, ghosts), I apologize for not catching on to your trolling. That's got to be what this is.
Glorious, unexpected, and 100% without holes replaying the story. It is the Shyamalan of the video game world, well, when the stuff he did was good, and had a twist that was also good.
Spec Ops gets a mention, but not for that 'white' part, but for a later one, when you
line through a building an smash that dudes face in before he has a chance to speak, but you know him, and had you waited, get a conversation with him instead.
Guybrush was a little kid lost in a theme park all along. This explains the anachronisms like the vending machine and the Disney tee-shirt in the first game, and the waterfall that you can turn off and sewer passages in the second game.
Honestly, I don't think it's THAT stupid of an idea, it's just how they handled it as a plot element. It is thrown at you in the last like 2 minutes of the game, in a voice over iirc, which I actually missheard the first time I played it and basically missed the twist.
People act like it's the dumbest plot point ever, but I don't know, I think they could have done something with the idea of a neurally connected device somehow requiring a human mind/memories or something to function optimally, I don't know. I feel like they could have made that concept work, but the game wasn't that interested with telling a fantastic story, and it just came across as super confusing and non sensical in the context of what came before.
I'm going to go very VERY old school and say Shin Megami Tensei I. The first time the "Law" (god and angels) faction shows that they're just as bad if not worse then Chaos:
The game starts out with a normal modern day tokyo, you go to the mall, visit the park, and things are very normal. You get your demon summoning program barely before your mother is eaten and replaced by a demon right out of the gate. As you basically watch all society crumble with the advent of demons you end up battling your way to the top of a skyscraper where the angels are doing something with the help of the military. You beat the guy (thor) and he reveals there's already an atomic weapon on it's way to the city. "Glory to god and his thousand year kingdom!" he shouts. Then all the enemy encounters disappear and an overlay timer with 35 seconds or so imposes over the dungeon view.
It's a crazy feeling, First there's shock "What? A timer in a dungeon crawler?" You think "oh god I got to do something" and then you immediately think "but what can I do?" and the only thing left is your lizard brain telling you to run as many flights of stairs down as you can. All the while your mind is shouting that's going to do nothing against an atomic weapon.
If you hurry you can dash down all the stairs and get right past the american security guard at the basement parking lot a few seconds before the bomb hits. His dialogue changes to "What are you so upset about?" mere seconds before the world goes from apocalyptic to post-apocalyptic.
For the rest of the game every time you go to the shattered overworld map you remember that you saw it whole and you lived in that world for so many hours. It's great
The Walking Dead Season 1 Episode 2. The buildup to the twist was exceptionally handled. You start thinking of random ideas, then it becomes clearer and clearer.
The family you're staying with are cannibals. Your injured friend who was supposed to be taking a rest got butchered and your group (including kids) are about to feast on his legs.
The episode still haunts me and I can't replay the game because of this episode.
Basically every ending but the true ending is quite chilling because it leads up to a BIG QUESTION about to be solved...only to be cut short by someone dying or you dying or simply not being able to continue at all. 999's Axe Ending and Safe Ending were great for this... but in VLR you get Clover's Ending which is a sort of heap of dead characters, or the other ending where your art gets cut off and you're left abandoned.
I beat 999 at about 4am, and the sequence in VLR where Phi starts talking at 2x the normal speed. I was freaked out a lot by both instances because I was super-duper tired and both moments give you a lot of information to ingest...
The girl is the Atomic Bomb...the whole sequence played in "reverse" was brilliant and chilling
Chrono Trigger:
Meeting the Guru as he's "lost his mind", technically talking about later-game spoilers. Then you come back later to him missing/dead. Also in Robo's end-game factory chapter, you see people on a conveyor belt turning into...dead. The scream you hear, however, is pretty messed up.
NieR: A lot has been said, but I'll focus on a part of the ending --
Yonah is rescued, but never cured. Humanity, iirc, is doomed as well having killed the only creature who can save it
The Kirby Series:
For a game that takes place in "Dreamland", just about every final boss is pretty much "Nightmare Fuel"
Zelda 2: Ganon's game over laugh. It's not a spoiler, but that shit creeped me out as a wee-kid. He was actually my "monster in the closet"
THat laugh.... D:
Last of Us:
The moral ambiguity at the end. I also found the note left behind by Bill's "friend" pretty sad... And yeah, the two brother's deaths..and the cannibals (people also note of a sexual undertone...I never caught on to it though)
. The whole game is a rollercoster, ain't it?
Live-A-Live:
Cube's chapter is pretty twisted ..BUT ALSO FUCKING OERSTED..>ALL OF IT: The Great Hero (forgot his name) dies of a disease when you find out you didn't slay the right monster, you are tricked into an illusion where you kill the King, the villagers condemn you, the Monk becomes the last person who knows your tale but is later killed for defending you, then your "best friend" dies by your hands after betraying you, and the Princess/fiancee hates you and kills herself.
/Winner for most "Traumatized SNES Hero"?
Breath of Fire III:
You kill the mother Nue who was only protecting her babies... So you become town hero. You take a shady request, fuck up the town mayor, but his seedy connections ostracize you from the village that praised you and lead to the "demise" of your friends and life as you knew it
. Small, but sad.
Breath of Fire IV:
That village of kids are pretty much assassinated. Mami's death is really heart breaking...or even that fucking boar sacrificing itself tugged on the heart
Breath of Fire V:
Headless Nina clones in test tube tanks....not cool. A lot of the "violence" in Bosch's life qualifies as well... he gets pretty brutalized as well, from artificial limbs (complete with brilliant foreshadowing) to a dragon tearing apart his body from the inside. yum yum.
Not most disturbing but rather unexpected. Magical Starsign. Light hearted kids RPG but then towards the end (this'll be slightly off)
You know the "gummies" that the robots are powered by. Those are dead people. In fact the robots wiped out the civilisation on their home planet in search of energy.
If that wasn't enough
the end area of the game looks like a candyland which turns people into gummies to feed to a giant worm. The giant worm will ultimately metamorph and eat the dying sun to give birth to a new one.
The ending doesn't makes things exactly happy either
Yeah yeah the sun is rebooted for some reason and robots can now run on solar power but the whole premise of the plot "save teacher" is for nowt (shes dead, also the robot party member had to incapacitate itself to stop eating her in gummy form too) the and most the characters have rather meh endings (main character heads of to space, three other characters are involved in making, piloting and being part of a rocket to follow him and as for the other two, one gets a scholarship the other becomes a crimefighter).
I vote Silent Hill 2 in terms of WHAT A TWIST because honestly, I just wanted to see how it would all play out. The whole fucking game is a labyrinth of half answers and misdirection. Everyone mentions the VHS part deservedly but what comes next (dual sacrifice, confrontation, resolving Angela) just floored me from start to finish.
Elly wasn't the reincarnation of Abel's mother. Abel was lost and lonely and wanted a mother, so the Wave Existence created Elly with a 'mother's will' to love Abel and be a companion for him, so he wouldn't be alone.
).
