The best twist endings in video games change what you thought you were playing. A great one makes you want to start over to spot the clues, and a perfect one hides those clues in plain sight: in dialogue, in chapter titles, perhaps even the controller you’re holding. These ten games span three decades and nearly every genre, from horror to puzzle-platformers to a Game Boy adventure about a dream. But they all have one thing in common: Every one of them had us totally fooled the first time.
[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for the twist endings of these games.]
10
Spec Ops: The Line (2012)
Dubai has been buried. A run of sandstorms drove out the city’s wealthiest residents and left its skyscrapers standing vacant. Colonel John Konrad’s 33rd Battalion stayed behind to help with the evacuation, and then went dark. You play as Captain Martin Walker, a Delta Force operator leading two squadmates on a mission to confirm survivors and get out. The helicopter chase that opens the game looks like any other military shooter for a reason: Lead writer Walt Williams said the team wanted to keep things conventional before taking away “that power fantasy.”
The twist: Konrad has been dead the whole time. The man guiding Walker over the radio is a hallucination Walker built to blame someone else for the cruelty he enacts against soldiers and civilians alike. Walker eventually finds Konrad’s corpse and then, in the final moments of the game, has a potentially damning choice to make…
9
BioShock Infinite (2013)
“Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.” That’s the job given to Booker DeWitt, a debt-ridden ex-Pinkerton and Wounded Knee veteran. The girl in question is Elizabeth, locked in a tower in Columbia, a floating city that seceded from the United States. It’s currently drifting in the clouds under the rule of a tyrannical prophet named Comstock. Ken Levine, the game’s director and writer, has called Elizabeth the game’s “emotional center.” BioShock Infinite spends hours making you care about her.
The twist: Booker and Comstock are the same man, split by a baptism that sent two versions of him down different paths. Elizabeth is Booker’s daughter, Anna. (The “AD” brand on his hand stands for Anna DeWitt.) To end the loop, Elizabeth takes Booker back to the baptism and drowns him before Comstock can be born.
8
Shadow of the Colossus (2005)
A young man rides across a forbidden land with a body slung over his saddle as the story opens. He’s brought Mono, a girl who has died, to the Shrine of Worship at the far end of a land where the dead can be brought back. There, a voice called Dormin offers him a deal: Destroy 16 colossi, one for each idol in the shrine, and Mono will live. The young man, named Wander, is warned that the price for this could be heavy. Wander’s answer is simple: “It doesn’t matter.”
The twist: The price was indeed very heavy. The colossi are pieces of Dormin, sealed away, and every one you kill frees a fragment of that voice into Wander, who grows paler and darker over the game. Once the last piece is freed, Dormin possesses Wander. One exorcism later, Mono wakes up to find a tiny horned baby in Wander’s place.
7
Silent Hill 2 (2001)
James Sunderland’s wife, Mary, died three years ago. Now, a note in her handwriting asks him to meet her in “our special place” in Silent Hill. He drives to the lakeside town, finds the road blocked, and walks into a fog. There, he finds monsters, an exhausted woman named Angela, a nervous man named Eddie, and a woman named Maria who looks uncannily like Mary. Konami’s Team Silent built the game as a horror story about grief. Its monsters are manifestations of a person’s psyche, like the Bubble Head Nurse, which art director Masahiro Ito designed to evoke Mary’s illness.
The twist: James killed Mary. He repressed the memory, and the game sees him dig it up. Pyramid Head, the executioner who stalks him, embodies his guilt and his desire for punishment. The ending you get depends on how you treated Maria and Mary’s letter. You could end up leaving Silent Hill. You could also drive into a lake.
It’s 1964. A soldier drops through the clouds into the Soviet jungle. Naked Snake, an American special forces operator, has been sent to help a defecting scientist named Sokolov escape. Hideo Kojima’s prequel sends you hunting for food and camouflaging in the brush, all against the backdrop of the Cold War at its most paranoid. Everything’s going as well as it could until Snake’s mentor (aka the Boss) defects, kidnaps Sokolov, and joins the rogue colonel Volgin. Snake is dispatched on a cleanup operation to fix things.
The twist: The Boss’s defection was a government plot. Her real mission is to die at Snake’s hands so the US can clear its name. The final confrontation forces him to do it. The CIA rewards him with the codename Big Boss, but Snake knows the truth.
5
Dead Space (2008)
The USG Ishimura has stopped answering its calls. It’s a planet-cracking mining ship that has gone dark above Aegis VII, a rocky mining planet. Isaac, an engineer, is dispatched to figure out why. Isaac has personal stakes in this mission: He’s hoping to find Nicole, his girlfriend and the ship’s medical officer, who sent him a distress message. Once aboard, he finds the crew slaughtered and mutated into monsters. At the center of the carnage is a strange red obelisk — the Marker. This artifact is warping minds. Soon, Isaac is seeing things that aren’t there. Through it all, at least Nicole keeps turning up as a familiar face in the chaos.
The twist: Nicole, tragically, has died by suicide before Isaac even arrived. The Marker is feeding him hallucinations. While this is a surprise, if you look closely, the game was very clear about what was happening. The first letters of its 12 chapter titles spell out “NICOLE IS DEAD.”
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4
Braid (2008)
Every mistake in Braid can be undone with the press of a button. Tim’s mistake, he insists, is undoable, too. You play as Tim, a man in a suit who believes that rescuing a princess ‘snatched by a horrible and evil monster’ will make everything right. His home, and the rooms in it, seem to represent him going through different chapters of his life, trying to amend things. But it’s not quite that simple: As Tim goes through doorways in his home, he enters different worlds, painterly levels, each of which bends time in a different way, from one that ties time to movement to others that make certain objects immune to rewinding. At the end of every world, a messenger delivers the old Super Mario Bros. line: The princess is in another castle.
The twist: In the final level, time runs backward, and the story flips: The princess is fleeing from Tim, and the knight he thought of as a monster is actually rescuing her.
3
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013)
One controller, two thumbs, two brothers. Naia, the older brother, is controlled by your left stick and trigger; Naiee, the younger, is controlled by the right. Together, they search a storybook world of trolls, giants, and mountains for the water that can cure their dying father. The older brother can pull heavy levers and swim; the younger can slip through small gaps. The younger brother, notably, is afraid of the water, because his mother drowned in front of him. This game’s story is told without any intelligible dialogue. This means the controls themselves do a lot of work carrying the emotion.
The twist: Naia dies near the end. His half of the controller goes dead. After the younger brother buries him and finishes the quest, he reaches a river he can’t cross alone, until pressing the older brother’s trigger helps him swim. Nothing in the game tells you to try this. It’s a simple button press, but what it represents has invited years of debates about the nature of grief, brotherhood, and UI design.
2
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993)
A storm wrecks Link’s ship, and he washes up on a beach in a place that definitely isn’t Hyrule. Koholint Island is the first Zelda game setting without Zelda or the Triforce, which gives the entire experience a bit of a dreamy, out-of-place vibe. Adding to that feel is the island itself, replete with lovable oddball NPCs and a helpful talking owl. Link’s told that the only way off the island is to wake the Wind Fish, a giant whale-like creature, by collecting eight instruments guarded by nightmare bosses.
The twist: Koholint is a dream that the Wind Fish is having. Waking up the Wind Fish makes the island — and everyone on it — disappear. There are a few hints pointing at this throughout Link’s adventures, but that doesn’t lessen the grief of watching the island and characters you’ve come to love fading away at the end of the game.
1
Planescape: Torment (1999)
“What can change the nature of a man?” A man wakes up on a slab in a mortuary in Sigil, the City of Doors. He’s got no memory. His body is covered in scars and tattoos. He’s got a floating skull named Morte to keep him company. The man, known only as the Nameless One, is immortal. Every time he dies, he forgets who he was. Your goals in the first hours of the game are small and desperate: Learn his name, learn his history, and figure out why he can’t stay dead.
The twist: The enemy hunting the Nameless One is his own mortality, stripped from him by a ritual performed in a previous life. At the end, you realize that you’ve met and confronted his past selves throughout the game.
