A good plot twist is always an effective way to keep the player interested in the story. When something happens that you didn’t predict at all – but still makes sense in retrospect – it’s always a memorable part of the experience. Here are three plot twists from games released in 2012 that stuck with me.
Of course, the text below contains heavy spoilers (for Assassin’s Creed III, Resident Evil Revelations and Binary Domain), so read at your own risk.
Haytham is… - Assassin’s Creed III
In order to prevent getting spoiled on a game’s surprises, I always tend to avoid watching a lot of trailers or reading too much information before I play the game. When I started playing Assassin’s Creed III, I didn’t even know the first part of the game had you controlling another character, Haytham. The game starts in London, were you perform your first assassination. After that you leave for America and you arrive on the New Frontier. At some point I thought I had figured it out: Haytham was an English assassin who was going to become Connor’s father. Makes sense.
A bit later in the game Haytham recruits a new member into the organization. They go through a small initiation ritual, and Haytham holds a speech. And then he says…
You are a templar.
I never saw this coming at all, for hours I thought I had been controlling an assassin.
The truth behind Faye Lee - Binary Domain
Binary Domain takes place in the future. Androids (human like robots) have become so advanced that the governments of the world decided to prohibit research and development of robots that cannot be distinguished from humans. However, one of the biggest robot manufacturers in the world seems to be breaking this rule. You play as a member of a squad team sent to bring Amada, the leader of this company, in.
One of the soldiers you team up with during the game is the female sniper Faye Lee. At some point in the game she is captured by Amada. The protagonist wants to go rescue her, but the rest of his squad explains to him they have made a discovery. She is not an ordinary human being, but a hybrid between robot and human. Her mother was an incredibly advanced android, so she is the child of a robot mother and a human father, which, according to the official rules, makes her an enemy.
This is not the Queen Zenobia - Resident Evil Revelations
A large part of this Resident Evil game takes place on an eerie ship called the Queen Zenobia. Two teams (Jill and Parker, and Chris and Jessica) are on the ship at the same time, and you control them subsequently. At one point in the game, Jill and Parker have gotten themselves in a dangerous situation: stuck in a room that’s filling up with water. The other team starts a search for them, but when they arrive at the scene, they find no one. It turns out that they are on an entirely different ship called the Queen Semaramis, and all this time you have unknowingly been on two identical ships.
