10 Times Video Games Secretly Spoiled Their Own Story

6. The Game Literally Tells The Player To Stop - Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops: The Line is one of the most ambitious war video games ever made, a bleak and brutal commentary on both the futility of war and the nature of player agency in gaming itself.

The game concludes with the big reveal that protagonist Captain Martin Walker has actually been imagining the presence of the supposedly villainous maniac Colonel John Konrad the entire time, a soldier who frequently questions Walker's actions throughout the game.

Instead, he's a fabricated coping mechanism of sorts created by Walker's PTSD-riddled mind, while the real Konrad is in fact long dead.

It's a devilishly clever twist, and one which the game hints at quite fantastically mere minutes after it begins. As Walker and his team are approaching Dubai in the opening level, they're met with a literal stop sign in the middle of the desert.

The sign's placement should strike players as odd given the environment it appears in, yet most surely didn't expect that it was actually hinting at the game's prevailing theme, of players committing relentless murder in the stead of "following orders" to complete the game, despite their conscience probably telling them not to.

It's a more cryptic clue than most on this list, for sure, but still quite ingenious in its own way.