10 Most Important Video Game Easter Eggs Of ALL TIME

8. Dead Space - NICOLE IS DEAD

Metal Gear Solid Psycho Mantis
Electronic Arts

Visceral Games, the crafty sods, spoiled the big twist in their own game long before the fact. Not that you'd know it; the means of delivery is so obscure that only the linguistic equivalent of John Nash would pick up on the revelation without prompt. At face value, each of the 12 chapters that make up Dead Space's whole are wholly inconspicuous allusions to upcoming story beats.

Only upon further scrutiny, and arguably only in hindsight, does the hidden acrostic emerge to slap you around the chops. Plucking the first letters of every chapter name from their respective positions and placing them together forms the rather telling phrase, "Nicole is dead". Isaac Clarke spends the entirety of Dead Space believing an individual he's been interacting with while aboard the USG Ishimura is his long-lost partner of the same name, only to discover the bitter truth towards its climax.

That Visceral were brave enough to even allow players to discern the truth well ahead of the big reveal is commendable. Above all else, though, the phrase eliminates the ambiguity of Nicole's fate as presented in the game proper. The girl's deader than a doornail.

 
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Contributor

Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.