We all love a good ol’ plot twist. Whether it’s finding out that a ruthless, rather nasty Potions professor has been a good guy all along, or that Luke Skywalker’s father had a black mask and the raspiest voice in the Empire, plot twists make for great talking points and often re-contextualize the stories we consume.

Gaming, of course, is no stranger to plot twists, either. More often than not, plot twists in gaming don’t always work — either because we can see them coming a mile away, or they are just there for shock value. Regardless, when done right, some of these surprises stay with us throughout our lives, making us wish we could forget them to experience them all over again.

Major spoilers for Dead Space, Elden Ring, God of War Ragnarok, Doki Doki Literature Club, Spec Ops: The Line, Silent Hill 2, Final Fantasy VII, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, and BioShock.

10 Dead Space (2008)

The damsel isn’t distressed — she’s just dead

Dead Space remains one of the scariest games I’ve ever played, be it the original or the fantastic remake. I played the first game back in 2009, and at the time, it did feel like an important task to “save the girl”, going from station to station on the USG Ishimura. Of course, it turned out that the Marker had been making Isaac hallucinate Nicole, his girlfriend, the entire time, and she’d been dead well before he ever set foot on the ship.

In hindsight, it’s baffling that I never saw this coming, particularly because Nicole’s voice acting and her behavior in the game are just so weird and ‘dead-girly’. A far bigger holy sh*t moment came when I realized that the first letter of each chapter’s name tried to tell Isaac the truth all along.

9 Elden Ring (2022)

A queen wearing a king’s mask… and marrying it?

2022’s Elden Ring is inarguably the greatest FromSoft game ever, and also one of the best games ever, period. The insane amount of lore the game has puts even the Souls games to shame, thanks to some fantastic co-writing by George R.R. Martin, who knows a thing or two about intricate and complex world-building. Out of the few things that are clear to Elden Ring players, one is that Queen Marika is gone, and requires search and rescue.

It’s also made clear that she was in her second marriage with Radagon, who left the Golden Order to marry the sorceress Queen Rennala. The plot twist (one of many) in the game comes when players cast the Law of Regression incantation in front of Marika’s statue after exiting her chambers. The incantation reveals that Marika had always been Radagon, too, and boy did that take me a couple of hours and a lot of VaatiVidya to wrap my head around.

8 God of War Ragnarok (2020)

In another universe, Loki would’ve been proud of Odin for his shapeshifting

This one is perhaps my favorite gaming plot twist of all time. Call it recency bias or actually fantastic writing, but Tyr’s real identity was well-protected and when the cards were revealed, boy was a table flip warranted. Sadly, it’s also one I’ll always be salty about, because I played God of War Ragnarok in 2022 instead of its release year. I managed to stay spoiler-free for two years, but a week before I began playing, I opened a WatchMojo video about plot twists in gaming.

No, I’m not that foolish — I went to the description first to read the disclaimer about which games would be spoiled. That’s when it happened — the description itself had the words “Tyr is Odin” instead of something like “spoilers for God of War Ragnarok”.

That aside, the plot twist is just insanely gut-wrenching — not only does it reveal the king of the Norse gods to be hiding in plain sight all along, but it also takes away Brok from the players.

7 Assassin’s Creed III (2012)

Wait… I’m a bad guy for doing the exact things I’ve been doing?

It was 2012, and I was truly excited for the new Assassin’s Creed game. Yes, this was back when Desmond was still alive and a new AC game had the entire world on notice. It starts off by introducing us to a new protagonist, Haytham Kenway, and the prologue is all par for the course — until the Father of Understanding is mentioned at a meeting, and we realize that we’ve been playing as a Templar.

AC III did a rather good job of hiding it, and there wasn’t much to give away that Haytham Kenway was a member of the Order of the Templars — the group we’d been working against for five years and four games now.

6 Doki Doki Literature Club (2017)

A mentally harrowing game disguised as a dating sim

I’ve played my fair share of visual novels made on the Ren’Py engine over the years. However, none of them could hold a candle to the mental roller-coaster that Doki Doki Literature Club took me on. A psychological horror game disguised as a dating-sim, DDLC has you writing a poem as you become part of a literature club at school with three other students and a president.

However, it soon turns out to be a rather meta, fourth wall-breaking experience as DDLC’s characters struggle with serious mental health issues. When Sayori unalives herself, things get very strange, very quickly. I definitely thought I’d picked a path with a terrible ending, only to find out my saves were gone. Things get progressively worse until Monika reveals herself to be completely self-aware, controlling and manipulating the game’s code to delete characters at her will. I’ll always be glad that I got the better ending of the game’s two, where Sayori and the game creator popped up to thank me for playing towards the end.

5 Spec Ops: The Line (2012)

Not your run-of-the-mill shooter

A friend of mine from high school once told me to play Spec Ops: The Line because it was “so damn cool”, and nothing else. Heading into this third-person military shooters that looked just like another action game of its time, I had zero idea that the game even had a plot twist coming. Set in a futuristic version of Dubai drowned in sand, The Line tasks you with finding Colonel Konrad. You’re in the shoes of Captain Martin Walker, a typical, grizzled soldier barking orders at his squadmates.

Gradually, however, things spiral out of control. Walker begins questioning right from wrong, often jumping between the two, and the incident with the White Phosphorus remains one of the most gut-wrenching moments in gaming history. The plot twist, though, comes at the very end, as Walker loses his grip on reality, discovering that Konrad was dead the whole time, and all his interactions with the Colonel were only in his head. Then, there are the endings, which are so open to interpretation that I couldn’t even begin to cover them without a couple of hours on hand.

4 Silent Hill 2 (2001)

Psychological horror done absolutely right

If psychological horror games are your jam, then Silent Hill 2 is undoubtedly one of the very best games ever. Of course, I was three when the game came out, and the only time I came around to actually playing it was last year’s fantastic remake. The game is a fantastic deep dive into the mind of protagonist James Sunderland and his feelings of guilt and terror.

By this point, I knew the plot twist, since it’s one of gaming’s most well-known ones. Impressively enough, it didn’t take away from the impact at all, as the player finds out that James himself had smothered his wife Mary, and every monster in this fog-covered town he’d encountered was a manifestation of his own guilt as he tried to punish himself in ways he thought he deserved.

3 Final Fantasy VII (1997)

Innocence itself, pierced through the heart

Final Fantasy VII will always remain one of the greatest games I never played. Well, the original, at least. Despite my inability to like any turn-based-combat games, I gave FF7 Rebirth a shot just last year while vacationing at a friend’s house who wouldn’t stop going on about it. I’ll admit — I was invested in the story despite the combat, and as Aerith prayed for the world, I was taken aback by the beauty of the game and the sequence in particular.

That’s when Sephiroth dropped from the sky, and I got ready for a boss battle to protect Aerith. Of course, that wasn’t to be, because the blood tainted the ground, and I realized that Aerith was gone. You don’t get a chance to save or resurrect her, and I can bet I wasn’t alone in deciding to keep the controller away for a while, listening to Aerith’s theme until I felt just a little better.

2 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2009)

Turns out betrayals hurt a lot more in first-person

My introduction to the Call of Duty franchise was with 2011’s fantastic Modern Warfare III. As Price lit up his cigar after executing Makarov via hanging, I immediately knew I wanted more. The very next day, Modern Warfare II was installed and ready, and I had the time of my life working on Task Force 141. Sure, the “no Russian” massacre will always remain one of the most talked-about moments in gaming history, but what followed a few hours later felt far more horrific because of how personal it was.

After rescuing Price and searching for Makarov, Ghost and Roach download a treasure trove of intel for General Shepherd before meeting him at an extraction point. This is where it happened — Shepherd executed both Ghost and Roach, and the bullet felt so much more personal because of the first-person perspective.

1 Bioshock (2007)

Would you kindly question everything you did so far?

Now, forgive me for not having played Bioshock at the time it came out, but in my defense, I was busy playing Assassin’s Creed and the Spider-Man 3 movie game. I actually got around to playing Bioshock in 2017 on the PS4, when it was remastered for the Bioshock Collection. By this point, I knew what was coming — call it cultural osmosis and years of memes and whispers.

Towards the end, when Atlas reveals the truth, you realize you never had any sort of agency, and were conditioned like a puppet to obey every command without question. I was never playing the game — it was the other way around all along. Suddenly, Rapture wasn’t just a dystopia beneath the sea, but rather a mirror showing me how easily control could be disguised as freedom.

The best plot twists make even the most linear games replayable

When done right, plot twists become emotional gut punches that stay with you for years.

Plot twists truly flip the script and re-contextualize everything you have experienced up until that moment. In a medium as interactive as gaming, it is perhaps the hardest task to keep a plot twist hidden. After all, players do often see them coming because of how much involvement a game demands.

When done right, these twists aren’t just clever story beats — they are emotional gut punches that rattle you to the core and stay with you for years, serving as reminders of how powerful storytelling in games can be.