10 Video Games With Unimaginably Complicated Lore

Video games have come a long way since those early efforts that saw a solitary character always running to the right, never able to go back where they came from, and having to jump on animals just to earn a little money. In those days, flimsy backstories for these apocalyptic heroes filled a paragraph of manuals, if that. Now, entire teams work on the game story, and sometimes they go to extremes to make it a believable world.

This can be as simple as a few notes spread around the abandoned area that you're shooting up, showing you more about how these places fit together and what they were for before (sometimes literal) hell broke loose. Other times, a world is defined by the sheer weight of the in-game lore, as dozens of books fill in the history and culture. There are times when an interesting bit of geography turns out to have a history behind it, a feature gamers haven't even thought about has an official explanation, or simply the way knowledge is delivered is interesting.

Here's ten games that excel at building worlds in some very different ways.

The Mortal Kombat game series contains over 80 characters, not counting DLC special guests like Freddy Krueger or the new heroes and villains from MK vs. DC Universe. Each of those kombatants has a shared history in the complicated lore of Mortal Kombat, having affected real change upon each other through the years. With this grand tale being spread across multiple realms of reality, many of which also have shared histories, it's safe to say that Mortal Kombat is a game series with a lot of lore.

So much, in fact, that they decided to give it to us twice. Mortal Kombat 9 (or just Mortal Kombat as it's mainly known) started with the end of everything and Raiden desperately sending a message back through time to his past self. From that moment on the events of the first few games are retold with some key differences. Those who died were able to survive, while others died in their place during this version of events. All of which led to new heroes and villains taking centre-stage in events that were both familiar and wholly alien to fans.