11 Video Game Endings That Totally Trolled Gamers

3. The Tyler Durden - Spec Ops: The Line

The Ending: It turns out that the sadistic Colonel Konrad, who protagonist Captain Walker has been chasing for the entire game, committed suicide before it even began, and Walker is suffering from dissociative disorder in order to cope with the atrocities he's committed throughout the war (namely the gory white phosphorus sequence), while blaming Konrad for them. "Konrad" then points a gun at Walker and leaves it up to the player to decide who "lives" and who "dies". The ending from here branches into four results: Walker is shot by Konrad and dies, he gets rescued by his patrol, he opens fire on the patrol and is killed, or he opens fire on them but manages to wipe them out.

How It Trolled Players: With its inspiration from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (and obviously therefore Apocalypse Now), we weren't expecting a squeaky-clean ending for this criminally underrated gem, but the twist ending hit us like a freight train and left us completely gob-smacked. Though it's fun to sit through all four endings and see all the possibilities, none of them are particularly happy, and each serves as a disturbing commentary on the warping power of war. Though the game could have gone even further with its remarks about the nature of war and indeed of gaming (where we blindly follow objectives), Yager Development took what could have been a fun shooter and turned it into something infinitely more dark and meaningful, which is simply different from what a lot of people expected. And even if you were on-board with this sort of thing from the start, the twist itself is still a total mind-melter.