10 Video Game Twists We Never Saw Coming
2. Bioshock
When we think of video game twists, no phrase stings quite like ‘Would you kindly?’
Throughout Bioshock’s entire run time, we’d been led through a hellish underwater libertarian nightmare by the affable family man Atlas. His calming Irish brogue had been a comforting sound amidst all the murder and mayhem on Rapture, so when he revealed his identity as the ruthless and villainous Fontaine, it was tough news to take.
All this time, Jack (the player’s protagonist) had been Fontaine/Atlas’s illegitimate child, and had been sent away to the surface for later use in Fontaine’s war with Rapture’s mastermind Andrew Ryan. Whenever Atlas would request Jack carried out an action, he’d precede the command with a friendly ‘Would you kindly’, a hypnotic trigger that compelled Jack to obey without fail.
To learn that every action you had undertaken was at the behest of some cruel and distant father figure is a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s one of the many reasons why Bioshock has been canonised as one of the most potent pieces of interactive storytelling in modern memory.