10 Video Games That Are Totally Different By The End

One of the great benefits of a video game over, say, a movie, is the greater sense of kinship we might feel with the player character: having directly controlled their actions over potentially dozens of hours, we've been on the journey with them every step of the way.

And it's certainly rewarding to see characters end up in totally different places by game's end, yet sometimes developers might take this to extremes that prove divisive to say the very least.

Sometimes games are so shockingly different by the end that players don't necessarily know how to process it at first, marking a significant departure from the story, tone, and themes presented at the beginning.

In some cases it absolutely works as a surprise that bamboozles the player in a pleasantly unexpected way, while in others the results are more divisive among the fanbase, some of whom feel that the departure is simply asking too much of players to swallow down.

For better or worse, surely nobody saw these switch-ups coming, and few among us will ever forget experiencing these change-overs for the very first time...

Quantic Dream's Fahrenheit starts off as a relatively modest story - for the standards of a supernatural murder mystery thriller, anyway.

The game's opening moments, where protagonist Lucas Kane is possessed by a malevolent force and compelled to murder a random man in a diner, firmly establish the tone, yet it's one that director David Cage veers hilariously far away from by game's end.

The Twin Peaks-inspired promise of that terrific opening sequence gives way to a completely insane second half in which Lucas manifests superhuman abilities which allow him to fend off cops and mystical entities alike with the physics-defying skill of Neo from The Matrix.

The wildly over-the-top bullet time-style action couldn't feel much more at odds with the comparatively restrained occult thriller vibe of the game's early hours, while a thoroughly unconvincing love story is additionally tacked on for "good" measure.

It's been well-reported since Fahrenheit's release that large portions of the game's third act were cut due to development issues, but even so, it's tough to imagine the game ever reconciling its two disparate halves in a fully satisfying way.