Spider-Man PS4: What Does The Ending Really Mean?

4. Gearing Up For The Goblin

In the run up to Spider-Man releasing, fans were endlessly debating the role Norman Osborn would come to play in the story. The studio had chosen to reimagine Peter Parker's most notorious adversary as the Mayor of New York City, and with a glider nowhere to be seen, it soon became apparent that Norman was yet to suit up in his infamous green and purple garb.

Despite this, the Osborn of Insomniac's Marvel mythos is every bit as smarmy and repugnant as his comics counterpart. He's a shrewd political operator, ruthless as he is duplicitous, and though it looked likely by the third act that Insomniac would ignore his villainous ways, they teased something particularly important late on.

When MJ infiltrates Osborn's penthouse apartment - a devastating level where the player learns why Harry's been missing and why Martin Li has it in for Osborn - she comes across a set of spherical objects in its secret lab. They're purple, and she questions their purpose, but to the trained eye they can only mean one thing: pumpkin bombs.

Having survived his encounter with Doc Ock only to resign as the Devil's Breath controversy consumed his mayorship, the stage has been well and truly set for Norman to become the Goblin in the sequel. And that's without even mentioning those post-credits sequences...