8 Greatest Video Game Twists (With Zero Build-Up)
These twists left everyone shook totally outta nowhere.
Plot twists are a tricky beast to pull off in any medium, but perhaps never more so than in video games, where they often serve as the culmination of dozens, even hundreds of hours of time invested by the player.
And so, if a twist falls flat enough, it can sour the player's entire experience with the game, while on the other hand, a twist that's both smart and surprising will just elevate everything around it.
While it's always fun to revisit a game once you know the twist and appreciate all the ingeniously hidden breadcrumbs leading up to the big reveal, sometimes developers just drop an insane rug-pull in your lap and leave you to make sense of it yourself.
It's a bold gambit that can risk coming off as convoluted or even lazy, but sometimes a reveal that just blindsides players and catches them wildly off-guard is precisely what the story called for.
It's a tricky balance to strike, but these games managed to serve up a totally brilliant twist that also bamboozled players en masse way out of left field...
8. Master Miller Is Liquid Snake - Metal Gear Solid
Nobody does a plot twist quite like Hideo Kojima, and in terms of sheer WTF shock value, he's arguably never topped the delicious Master Miller reveal near the end of the first Metal Gear Solid.
Throughout the game, Solid Snake's old pal Master Miller provides moral support via codec calls, but after Snake uses the PAL keys and unwittingly activates Metal Gear REX, Miller reveals himself to have tricked Snake into doing so all along.
At this point, Colonel Campbell interrupts the call to tell Snake that somebody is impersonating Miller, and the real Miller's body was just discovered at his home, having been killed three days earlier.
"Miller" then reveals himself to be Liquid Snake, Solid's brother and the game's main villain, who has been posing as Miller for the entirety of the story.
Even though this is basically an un-guessable twist up to the point that it's revealed, the bait-and-switch is so damn brilliant - that we've been conversing with the antagonist for the whole game - that it's near-impossible to dislike.