10 Awful Villains That Ruined Amazing Video Games
3. Scott Shelby - Heavy Rain
Quantic Dream's lavish interactive drama Heavy Rain is in many respects a gorgeous, deeply involving mystery thriller in which protagonist Ethan Mars attempts to track down the enigmatic Origami Killer who has kidnapped his son Shaun.
Players control four different characters over the course of the game, with writer-director David Cage weaving a genuinely entrancing mystery that needs only stick the landing in order to become a solid gold classic.
Yet Cage fumbles the ball in the final stretch when it comes to revealing the identity of the Origami Killer, who happens to be none other than one of the playable characters, PI Scott Shelby.
The big problem with Heavy Rain's villain reveal is that it doesn't play fair. While controlling Shelby, players have been unknowingly experiencing events from an unreliable perspective, as some of Shelby's apparent actions earlier in the game are entirely contradicted once his identity has been revealed.
At best it seemed like a lazy attempt to prevent the player from guessing the killer's identity, and at worst a cheap stretch to toy with their emotions.
Either way, it caused Heavy Rain to wrap up with an absolute clunker of an ending, undermining almost all of the goodwill established up to that point.