10 Gaming Opening Levels Which Surprised Us All

There's no impression quite like a first impression, as the saying goes, and where video games are concerned, that opening level is hugely important.

A boring opening mission can immediately turn even enthusiastic players off, while a thrilling, well-crafted first chapter will ensure they're invested right away.

But sometimes ambitious developers decide to do something completely left-field, throwing off players' expectations and taking a risk to grab their attention.

From a dramatic fake-out to a surprise plot twist, or simply offering up a stylistically audacious opening unlike anything the series had done before, these opening levels certainly succeeded in keeping players on their toes.

While these openings may not have vibed with all players, for anyone open-minded enough to have their expectations flipped in a major way, they undeniably raised some tantalising questions.

Whether the rest of the game could live up to that gripping first level or not, they remain some of the most fascinatingly well-crafted, ballsy, and surprising openings in the history of the medium.

If most opening levels have an understandable tendency to play things safe, these ones bravely did anything but...

The original Silent Hill is one of the most singularly terrifying video games ever made, and it wastes no time at all sending players on a reality-bending descent into hells both literal and symbolic.

While many survival horror games of the era gradually eased players into a terrifying situation, Silent Hill threw them headlong into a pulse-pounding nightmare.

The game's very first level sees protagonist Harry Mason waking up from a car accident on the outskirts of the titular town, after which the player must run through the town's deserted, fog-soaked streets while pursuing Harry's missing daughter, Cheryl.

This eventually leads the player into a narrow alleyway where the camera angles become increasingly strange and disorientating, foreshadowing the horror that's about to announce itself.

The alley leads to a darker caged area where the player stumbles across a series of increasingly unsettling sights - a corpse under a bloody sheet, for one - while the intense musical score ramps up.

This climaxes with Harry discovering some bloody humanoid remains stuck to a fence, before similar-looking creatures start attacking Harry, eventually killing him.

Just when the player assumes they've reached a snappy Game Over screen, though, the scene shifts to show Harry waking up in the nearby diner. It was all part of the plan.

It's a masterful subversion of expectations that totally throws players off-base, basically telling them to expect the unexpected for the remainder of the experience.