10 Best Video Game Reveals You Had To Find Yourself

Early on in NieR: Automata there are many indications that it's set in the same world as its prequel. But the fact that Automata is set a staggering 8,000 years later also begs the question of whether or not that even matters.

NieR 1 ended with the slow and inevitable extinction of humanity. In attempting to save his daughter/sister (depending on which version of the game you played), Nier, namesake of the series, literally doomed everyone. 8,000 years later, androids have replaced humanity and the Earth was invaded by aliens, who have also gone extinct... because 8,000 years is a really, really long time.

But there are direct references to the first game's story. The most obscure of these is the Class 1 Patient Health Record, documenting the progress of NieR's daughter/sister as patient zero in the disastrous plan to separate human souls from their bodies in order to survive a thousand-year pandemic.

Finding this in an alien machine replica of a location from NieR 1 actually creates an enormous direct connection between the events of the previous game and the motivations of the alien machines, albeit one that requires a wiki's-worth of reading to fully understand.