Second Wind [Intro Music] I'm a sucker for plot twists. A really good plot
twist is the third point on the triangle where the other two points are the really good joke
and the really good jump scare. In all three cases we're taken by surprise to pleasant effect
that enhances the story, and in all three cases, that effect is completely lost if we in any
way see it coming. Especially jump scares. A good surprise jump scare gives me a shot of
adrenaline and a sense of "Ooh, you got me, well played." But if I know a jump scare is
coming, I just feel really anxious and miserable. That's why I never got on with Five Nights at
Freddy's. I suspect it might be lingering trauma from a childhood incident involving a beloved
helium balloon and an unexpected stucco ceiling. Maybe this is biased of me to say but I think
plot twists in video games are all the more interesting because of the interactive element.
We're a participant as well as an observer, all our decisions have been made under
false information, the blood of all those poor bastards in Spec Ops The Line is on our
hands too. Oh yeah, I should probably drop a general spoiler warning before I talk about any
more specifics. Hey viewers! Yes, including you, the person who's not really listening because
they put this on in the background while they water their crops in Stardew Valley - I'm going
to spoil some video game plot twists in a bit. I'll make sure to clearly state the name of
the game before I spoil it, but you've gotta pay attention for that to work. Meet me half way
here, I promise your cauliflowers will be fine. So to talk about what separates a good twist
from a bad twist, let's go straight to the top: my favourite plot twist in all of gaming. It's
in Second Sight, an old PS2 game by developers Free Radical, best known for the Timesplitters
series. In Second Sight, we open with the old chestnut of our dude waking up with amnesia and
psychic powers, and over the course of being on the run from some evil corporation or other
we gradually learn what happened in numerous flashbacks of a military operation gone wrong.
But something's off. Reality keeps changing. We'll learn that character X is dead, then after
the next flashback, character X is suddenly alive again. At the end there's a moment when it
seems all is lost and we are doomed to die, until the twist reveals the truth: what we
thought were flashbacks were in fact the events of the present day, and what we thought was the
present was a psychic prediction of the future. And so the day is saved as we can now prevent the
plot's inciting incident before it even occurs. Certainly didn't see that coming, and yet, it
doesn't feel unearned or like it came out of nowhere. Hell, in retrospect it's given away by
the fucking title. What about a bad twist? Plenty to choose from, but most recently I've been
replaying Beyond Good & Evil, and that's got a classic bad twist ending. At the final boss, main
character Jade is informed that she's actually a super special alien baby birthed or created in
some unspecific way from the Lovecraftian being that is the hitherto unmentioned big baddie.
This is a bad twist because it neither changes anything, nor explains anything. Until the very
final chapter Jade never demonstrates any alien characteristic or skills beyond being able to
smack things with a stick very hard, and she's never shown much interest in her own origins. She
has been highly motivated to stop the actions of the villains this whole time, so there's no
sense she might be tempted to switch sides. See, my two main criteria for a good plot
twist are firstly that I mustn't see it coming, and secondly that it can't come out of nowhere,
either. It has to be something the rest of the plot has been building up to, a final puzzle piece
that puts everything that's already happened in a new light. See, a really good twist means you
get two stories for the price of one. 'Cos you can replay it and see how knowing the twist
recontextualises everything that came before it. One of my favourite games with a
plot-recontextualising twist is of course Silent Hill 2. Hopefully if you've followed me for
a while you've already played that game and know the story, and if not hopefully I can ruin it for
you before Bloober Team does. In Silent Hill 2, we play James Sunderland, who comes to the titular
haunted town after receiving a letter from his long dead wife, and descends into a tortuous
odyssey through a surreal hellscape of violence and despair which on first playthrough might not
seem like it has any meaning behind it besides the standard horror setup of "clueless everyman
gets victimised for going somewhere he shouldn't." But then you get to the twist, in which its
finally revealed that James' wife Mary isn't long dead but rather quite recently dead, and
he killed her. Before having a psychotic break and stumbling to Silent Hill. And after that
you can replay the game and realise that all the horror he's gone through has been his own
subconscious mind screaming at him to remember what he did. That's why he's been seeing very
distinctly feminine monsters being victimised all over the place by a big burly dude with
a huge, thrusting weapon between his legs. And I bring this up because the whole
topic of plot twists in games came to mind while I was writing about Sanabi
for my Fully Ramblomatic yearly roundup video. Sanabi is a nice little pixel art
platformer with an in-depth plot about a man who loses his daughter in a terrorist
bombing and goes on a revenge rampage, in the process teaming up with a cheerful teenage
girl in what felt like a pretty straight ripoff of the whole Last of Us dynamic. But the
interesting entire-plot-recontextualising twist of Sanabi is that it turns out the girl
we've been escorting IS our daughter, and our memory of her death was false. Furthermore, we're
actually a kill robot implanted with the memories of a dead soldier that have been tweaked
a bit to make us a more effective killer. It was unexpected and somewhat foreshadowed by
various events in the plot, but at the same time, it left a bad taste in my mouth. It felt cheap,
somehow. And I wondered why. Specifically, why the false memory twist in Silent Hill 2 works
for me, but not this one. On reflection, what it comes down to is that there's a difference between
"unreliable narrator" and "the plot flat out lies to the audience." See, Sanabi's protagonist's
false memories are shown to us as full on cutscenes. We literally see his daughter die in
a bombing attack and the fictional events leading to his revenge rampage, and we have no reason to
doubt them, because of the unspoken understanding in a third person game that we view things
from the perspective of an omniscient overseer. The equivalent would be if Silent Hill 2 opened
with a cutscene flat out showing Mary dying of natural causes in front of James with a great
big calendar on the wall declaring it to be three years ago. That doesn't happen. What happens
is, the story about Mary dying three years ago is something we only ever hear from James' mouth, in
his opening monologue. It's James rather than the game as a whole that is lying to us, or more
accurately, himself. At first we've no reason not to take his word for it, but over the course
of the game there are many hints to the fact that James is a little bit off, mentally. He's confused
about certain details, he's weirdly fixated, he sticks his hand right down a toilet at one
point without a moment's hesitation. And it's all those moments that are paid off when the
full extent of his self-delusion is revealed. Lying to the audience like in Sanabi and that
one bit in Heavy Rain where we learn after the fact that a character we were controlling
murdered someone during the time we were controlling them and the game deliberately
didn't show us, smacks of a writer trying to make their twist impossible to predict, because
it feels to them like some kind of victory over the audience. There's a word for authors who
do that: "dickweeds." Who cares if someone might predict your precious twist? Speculating
is half the fun. Let them have their moment of glory. Don't put your own ego above the value
of the experience you're trying to create. So that's three rules for a good twist: must
be unexpected, must recontextualize the plot, and no lying to the audience. But there's
got to be even more nuance to this, because thinking about it, all of these
criteria are also met by the twist at the end of 12 Minutes. It's undeniably effective,
I just doubt that the intended effect was to make me hate the game's guts. Guess we'll have to
tack on one more rule. Rule 4: no incest babies. THIS VIDEO WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY
