The Big Secret You Missed In GTA 5

4. How GTA V Lets You "Turn Into" Animals

Grand Theft Auto V Michael
Rockstar

Now let's get to the meat of the matter - the enhanced versions of GTA V let you inhabit the form of basically any animal featured throughout the game.

Or to be precise, the game allows you to collect and chew on peyote, the hallucinogenic properties of which will make Michael, Trevor, or Franklin go on an epic trip and believe they've inhabited a nearby animal.

How does it work exactly? Well, there are 27 peyote plants to collect throughout Los Santos on land, air, and sea, and upon approaching one of the distinctive-looking plants, you'll be able to hear the faint sound of an animal, which will confirm which type of creature you're about to turn into.

You'll then receive a prompt to eat the peyote, after which the character will fall to the ground as the screen begins to distort, and they'll "transform" into the animal type who they just heard.

Depending on the psychoactive cacti you consume, you can assume the form of dogs, cats, birds, fish, sharks, bears, cows, deer, pigs, and rabbits - basically every animal you'll encounter in the game.

As the animal, players can move or fly around the world with impunity and harass or even kill pedestrians. In the case of birds, they can even defecate from a great height and rack up a wanted star level by flying into restricted airspace.

While playing as four-legged animals, you can make a noise by pressing what is traditionally the car horn button, all while your human character's voice can be heard commenting on the abject insanity of this out-of-body experience.

The hallucination will end either when the player voluntarily opts to stop it with the press of a button, or if they end up getting themselves killed. Hilariously, though, the character will briefly continue to act like the animal they believed they were after "returning" to human form.

Rockstar has updated and expanded this feature over time, such as introducing it to GTA Online in 2019 for a series of limited time events, most of which have taken place during Halloween.

But the most significant addition for GTA V itself came with 2015's Freemode Events Update, which offered up the pièce de résistance by allowing players to enter the body of the one, the only, Bigfoot...

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Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.