10 Plot Twists That Change How You See Video Games
4. Spec Ops: The Line - Do You Feel Like A Hero Yet?
To the uninitiated, Spec Ops: The Line looks like yet another mundane military shooter. You play as a soldier who looks like he's been ripped straight from an army recruitment poster, the gameplay is remarkably unremarkable, and the colour palette consists of fifty shades of beige.
Ingeniously however, this is all a carefully crafted façade. Things quickly spiral out of control when you command player character Captain Walker to bomb a hostile area with White Phosphorus, a horrific chemical weapon. As Walker approaches the scene, one of the victims of the attack pleads with him, asking why he did such a thing and saying to him "we were helping".
In a moment of regretful realisation, Walker rounds the corner to see his chemical attack has killed dozens of innocent civilians who the enemy soldiers were assisting.
The disturbing image of a mother's charred corpse shielding her child's eyes haunts Walker, and as he continues on his mission he is stalked by hallucinations as his sanity unravels. With constant chiding from Konrad, Walker begins to break down as the atrocities he has committed fracture his mind, leading the player to consider the nature of choice and consequences surrounding violent acts in games overall.