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.] 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… “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.
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.
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