10 Earth-Shattering Video Game Plot Twists You Didn't See Coming

It is the 2000’s and Bioware is on a roll. Jade Empire and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic produced two of the best plot twists gaming will ever see and capped off the masterful performance with Mass Effect’s iconic introduction to the Reapers.

The game quickly and effectively establishes Saren, a rogue Turian Spectre, as its primary villain: we see him murder a fellow Spectre in cold blood, pursue a racist agenda against humanity and leverage his legendary reputation to cover his corruption. His personal spaceship, dubbed Sovereign, while powerful, is never presented as anything other than a simple spacecraft.

But there is nothing simple about Sovereign. In a chilling conversation with the eldritch beast it is revealed that it is the brains behind the operation – Saren is merely an indoctrinated puppet.

Worse, Sovereign is the vanguard of the Reapers, an advanced cybernetic species responsible for a perpetual cycle of galactic genocide, and now the clock is about to strike midnight.

It is a twist that jacked the stakes up to an existential level, transformed an already great game into the stuff of legend, and laid the foundation for a series that would define a genre.