A good twist can turn a story on its head, taking the plot in directions you never considered. They make you think and question your assumptions. But a poorly handled twist will quickly take you out of a game, often leaving you laughing or cringing at the writers. There’s also the risk of an obvious twist that comes off as boring and cliché. Either way, it takes a deft hand to deliver a quality twist in video games, and many games fail to walk that precarious plank. Below, you’ll find the five worst twists in video game history, many of which break the rules in more ways than one.
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5) Batman: Arkham Knight
During the pre-release cycle for Batman: Arkham Knight, many players guessed the titular Arkham Knight was going to be Jason Todd, one of the many Robins who worked under Batman. Developer Rocksteady repeatedly stated that the Arkham Knight was a completely original character that Batman fans had never seen before. In fact, the developers said this was their chance to leave a mark on the Batman franchise.
A little over halfway through the story, it was revealed that the Arkham Knight is, in fact, Jason Todd. It’s not so much a bad twist as one that the developers ruined by acting like it wasn’t happening. There’s something to be said for surprising fans, but this was taking it too far and blew back on Rocksteady.
4) The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope
I’m going to show my age here by referencing a TV show that peaked in 1979, but season nine of Dallas is an example of a bad twist. The show, which had the cliffhanger of all cliffhangers with the “Who Shot J.R.?” storyline, kept trying to one-up itself, which led to season nine being a dream inside of a character’s head. It was universally panned, and the plot device should’ve been left behind for good.
Unfortunately, the developers at Supermassive Games decided to pull a similar ploy in Little Hope, which reveals at the end that the characters in the game are parts of one character’s psyche. Just like Dallas, it doesn’t really work and makes everything you just played feel pointless.
3) Bionic Commando
The Bionic Commando falls more into the “dumb” category than being a failure of storytelling, but it’s still not good. Playing as Nathan “Rad” Spencer, you have a bionic arm that lets you traverse the world with ease, making for a few neat gameplay mechanics.
As you play, you learn that the arm is actually Spencer’s wife, Jayne Magdalene. It sounds like a joke, but it’s the direction developer Grin decided to take things. As you’d probably expect, it doesn’t work very well and has been widely panned by anyone who has had the bad fortune to pick this up.
2) Twelve Minutes
Twelve Minutes isn’t just one bad twist; players are “treated” to two of them. The game seemingly takes place in a time loop where you find out your wife is pregnant. A cop arrives and accuses the wife of killing her husband. After solving the first secret of the loop, you learn that the husband and wife are half-siblings and the cop is his father, trying to convince him not to fall in love with his half-sister.
That’s bad enough. The incest angle would have doomed this twist to the trash bin of twist history on its own, but then developer Luis Antonio decides to take it one step further, revealing that, much like Dallas and Little Hope, it was seemingly all a dream. Just a stupendously bad story without any real saving graces.
1) Heavy Rain
Let me be clear: Heavy Rain‘s twist revolving around the killer’s identity is bad. It’s made even worse because it doesn’t make sense. The team at Quantic Dream wants to surprise you by making you play as the killer, but to pull that off, they can’t show you the actual story.
Instead, you’re treated to a version of Scott Shelby’s story that makes the twist impossible to guess. By doing so, it also means the twist can’t work. There’s just no way the events of the game line up correctly, leaving Heavy Rain‘s big reveal feeling like you’ve been duped. That can work if the twist makes logical sense, but David Cage and his team can’t pull that off here.
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