10 Video Game Endings That Totally Trolled Players
9. The Cheap Killer Reveal - Heavy Rain
Heavy Rain marked a major artistic step up for developer Quantic Dream and their unique "interactive drama" video games, though it also wasn't without writer-director David Cage's now-customary storytelling indulgences.
The thriller, centered around a serial killer called the Origami Killer, spectacularly implodes in the final stretch when it's revealed that one of the game's four playable characters, P.I. Scott Shelby, was the killer all along.
The problem with this reveal and everything that follows is that it completely invalidates the player's perspective throughout the game.
Up to this point, the clear implication is that the gameplay is an objective depiction of events, but given that an earlier scene in an antiques shop made it physically impossible for Shelby to be the killer, this late-stage twist felt like a cheap moving of the goalposts for the sake of shock value.
We thought we were playing a matter-of-fact story when, actually, it was an unreliable representation of what happened. Nothing in the game leading up to the reveal hints at the deception, and so many players felt cheated by Cage's lazy writing.
Though players can arrive at several different endings after Shelby is revealed to be the killer, the lousy twist sucks so much air out of the story that you couldn't really be blamed for losing interest entirely.