10 Storytelling Clichés In Video Games That Need To Die
5. You Were The Bad Guy All Along
Prime Offender: Bioshock: Infinite, Spec Ops: The Line, Heavy Rain
WHAT?! Me?! I’m the baddie?! I did not see that coming.
Oh wait, yes I did. Because the ‘you were the bad guy all along’ cliché, or its cousin, ‘It was your fault all along’, has been done to death in video games.
It’s an attempt to add a Shyamalan-style twist to the proceedings; a rug pull in which everything you thought you knew – about the game and yourself – is a filthy lie.
That’s dandy if all the clues cleverly hint at what’s really going on, but it’s become a fallback for some games, designed to inject some extra tension at the expense of believability. What’s worse is when this cheap cliché is used to develop a character arc for someone who, beyond being an avatar for the player, has no real personality.