The Most Shocking Twists In Gaming

Amnesia is a great storytelling tool for video game designers - by putting the player in control of what is essentially a blank slate, they can get away with a lot when it comes to narrative. In BioWare's epic Star Wars RPG Knights Of The Old Republic, you wake up aboard a Republic ship under attack by the forces of Darth Malak. This nasty Sith is the former disciple of the even nastier Darth Revan, and you go forth to bring the pair to justice. As you progress, you piece together your past until you realize that you are Darth Revan, brainwashed by the Jedi Council to do good. Of course, that doesn't mean you have to...

The Resident Evil has plenty of shocks, true, but one of the most unsettling - and most important - comes at the end of the first game, where it is revealed that Albert Wesker, the leader of S.T.A.R.S's Alpha Team, has been a deep cover agent for the nasty Umbrella Corporation the whole time. Wesker would grow into the franchise's main villain, and his turn in this first game added a new layer of horror to the proceedings.

Jonathan Blow's Braid is one of the most lauded indie games of the last decade, with its clever time-manipulation mechanic breathing new life into the platformer genre. The story, at first glance, seems simple - the protagonist Tim must rescue a princess from a monster, Super Mario style. However, when you reach the last level, you learn something horrible. At first, the scene plays backwards, with the Princess helping you progress by flipping switches. But once you reach the end, the timestream flips, and you realize she's not trying to help you. She's trying to stop you. Because you are the monster.

So for the majority of Final Fantasy VI, you're assembling a group of adventurers from all over the planet to help fight the evil machinations of the Emperor Gestahl and his minion Kefka. It all comes to a head aboard a floating continent, where Kefka prepares to kill Gestahl and sieze ultimate power. You've got all your dudes, all your equipment, it's time to go save the world, right?

Wrong. You lose the battle, Kefka gets the power, and the whole world is ripped apart. You wake up from a coma a year later and have to crawl back from the ashes in a world that has been radically transformed. This was a game-changer in every sense of the world, and anybody who played through it has unforgettable memories of the World of Ruin.

Time travel is always a mess, but it can also open up the potential for some amazing shockers. In Sucker Punch's open-world adventure inFamous, the player's main antagonist is a man named Kessler who has similar powers as him and a wicked grudge. Kessler kidnaps Trish, your girlfriend, and kills her in front of your eyes. Once you kick his ass, the ending reveals that Kessler is actually you from the future, and he traveled back in time to get rid of anything that would prevent you from meeting your destiny and defeating an even bigger bad guy called the Beast. So he killed his own future wife. Can't wait to see how the sequel plays out.

One of the major tenets of the Silent Hill series is that true horror comes from within, as well as without. Silent Hill 2 epitomizes this strategy with its chilling late-game twist. As James Sunderland, you're brought to the titular town by a letter from your wife Mary, who says she's waiting for you "in your special place." The only problem is that Mary is dead.

As you explore the town, you meet a number of locals and visitors, including the extroverted Maria. You quickly learn that all of these people are united by a common thread of killing a family member, and James is no different - he finds a video in the Lakeview Hotel that depicts him suffocating Mary as a mercy killing. It turns everything we know about the character and the game upside down in one fell swoop.

The Metal Gear games are notorious for their labrynthine, twisting plots - nothing is ever as it seems in Solid Snake's world. In the very first Metal Gear Solid, Solid Snake is helped by being able to talk with a number of people on his codec headset, including Colonel Roy Campbell, Doctor Naomi Hunter and survival coach Master Miller. Their intelligence helps you get through a number of the game's more challenging moments, but when the chips are down Miller manipulates Snake into making a potentially world-threatening mistake before revealing that he is actually Liquid Snake, your nemesis and imperfect clone, in disguise. Damn!

Another amnesia plot here, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl uses it to really hammer home a disquieting twist. When you start the game, all you know is what your PDA tells you: "Kill Strelok." With no other leads to follow, you set out through the radioactive wasteland to find this mystery man and get some clues to your true identity.

Things aren't ever that easy, though, and as you explore the blasted-out ruins of Chernobyl you eventually discover that the mission was given to you by a self-aware AI program called "C-Consciousness," and it was having a buggy day because you are Strelok. Needless to say, you don't kill yourself.

For most of Crackdown, you feel pretty good about yourself - as a biologically enhanced super-agent for a private agency, you've been kicking ass through Pacific City, systematically demolishing the organized crime groups that have kept the citizens living in fear. Los Muertos, the Volk, Shai-Gen - they all fall to your combination of lethal force and superhuman abilities.

And then, the job well done, you realize that all you've done is turned Pacific City into an Orwellian police state under the absolute control of the Agency, with citizens now more afraid of your ultraviolent tactics than they were of the gangs. Nice work, bro.