8 Video Game Moments You Didn't Realise Were Tricking You

Video games are all about spinning illusions. The illusion of choice, the illusion of power, the illusion of agency; developers try their hardest to make players think they're not on a carefully curated journey (which, of course, they are).

In the best games, this magic trick is pulled off perfectly. In a lot of cases though, trickery inside your favourite games is done in order to eventually deliver some kind of killer twist.

We've covered this kind of thing a lot at WhatCulture Gaming, whether it's being tricked into committing war crimes in Spec Ops: The Line or being brainwashed with a trigger word in the original Bioshock, however the following examples don't draw attention to themselves in the same way.

In fact, in all of the following scenes, the actual trickery on display wasn't revealed until a long time after the fact. Hell, in some cases it took decades.

Consequently players have been going through them none the wiser, not knowing that they'd been duped for all these years.

Silent Hill 2 isn't just one of the best horror games of all time because it features spooky monsters, but because those monsters actually mean something. Here, the things that haunt the foggy town of Silent Hill are all manifestations of protagonist James Sunderland's inner fears, and the guilt he feels over the death of his wife.

Now, a lot of this has become the stuff of horror legend over the years, with the likes of the seductive nurse monsters and the iconic Pyramid Head being analysed in terms of their symbolic value.

There is another, more subtle way, that the game tricks players into feeling uncomfortable about the character they're playing as though.

As you walk through the town of Silent Hill you'll occasionally see the remains of its other victims - dead bodies strewn across the pavement, covered in blood.

It turns out, however, that these bodies are actually exact replicas of James' own character model. Consequently, the player isn't unsettled only because they're seeing the aftermath of violent acts, but deep down know they are being shown the death of the character they're struggling to keep alive.

What a game.