10 Video Game Twists We Never Saw Coming

Jonathan Blow’s magnum opus often gets vilified for being pretentious or ‘too clever by half’, but it was a watershed moment for indie puzzles game.

People tend to remember it for two reasons, the first being its tendency to throw players under the bus with completely obtuse puzzles, and the second being its sly shock of an ending.

Set up as an archetypal ‘save the princess’ platformer, Braid is unashamedly a Mensa-level Mario pastiche.

As Tim, Braid’s besotted and besuited protagonist, the player stomps on enemies, jumps from platform to platform, and finds keys to new areas. Puzzles aside, it’s a pretty cut-and-dry platformer, that is, until the ugly truth behind Tim’s infatuation with the princess is revealed.

While all along we were under the impression that Tim was the heroic everyman destined to ‘get the girl’, and the armoured figure escorting her away was some sort of kidnapper, that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

In reality, Tim was the very monster he’d sworn to defeat, the princess had been setting him traps all along in order to halt his advances, and the armoured figure was a brave knight who was trying to rescue the princess from Tim.