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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nBioShock<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
After casting players as the enigmatic \u2018Jack\u2019 and putting them through a fairly traumatic, watery plane crash, 2K Boston\u2019s first-person shooter adventure wastes little time in thrusting those same players into the depths of Rapture, a failed utopian city at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean created by eccentric business magnate Andrew Ryan. Seemingly alone, apart from the voice of mysterious freedom fighter \u2018Atlas\u2019 in your ear, BioShock sees the player used as a pawn of sorts between Atlas and the nefarious Andrew Ryan, who has overseen the fall of Rapture and the violent, biologically engineered madness of its many citizens which followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout the game, BioShock has the player continually being instructed and directed by Atlas to complete various objectives and tasks – often prefaced by the seemingly harmless polite preamble of \u201cWould you, kindly?\u201d. Well, as it turns out this is a subconscious trigger phrase that Rapture\u2019s thought-to-be-long-dead premier gangster – Fontaine – has been using under his guise as Atlas to force Jack to carry out his plans. After nearly twenty hours of play, having the guy that guided you through thick and thin and provided you with a friendly, encouraging voice where none existed, only to be outed as the primary antagonist of the whole thing was an utter masterstroke and one that still resonates even today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nDead Space<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Arriving at the spaceship USG Ishimura, engineer Isaac Clarke is tasked with boarding the vessel to discover what has happened to his partner Nicole Brennan and why the ship\u2019s systems have gone radio silent. As it turns out, the crew has been murdered and turned into Necromorphs – terrifying sharp-limbed reanimated corpses that just want to murder and spread their contagion to anything they can find. Holding onto the increasingly desperate video and audio messages from his wayward partner, Isaac eventually comes to realise that Nicole would never have been found alive as she had committed suicide to prevent herself from turning into a Necromorph. Dead Space ends with a mentally wrecked Isaac being attacked by a horrific hallucination of Nicole. This one still hits home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nFinal Fantasy VII<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Oh boy, where to start with this one? Let\u2019s start with Final Fantasy VII\u2019s big bad Sephiroth who believed that his conception was the result of the alien deity Jenova, but it\u2019s actually revealed that his parents are none other than the amoral Professor Hojo and Lucrecia Crescent, the wayward love of the endlessly cheerful Vincent Valentine. A tad awkward, methinks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Elsewhere, for much of the time that Sephiroth speaks and interacts with the primary protagonist Cloud, he makes our spiky-haired hero believe that he is nothing more than a clone of Sephiroth himself. It\u2019s only as Square-Enix\u2019s landmark JRPG begins to march toward its conclusion that we discover Cloud isn\u2019t a clone of Sephiroth, but rather has a deeply fractured psyche which makes him vulnerable to both Hojo and Sephiroth\u2019s assertions. So yeah, it\u2019s a whole thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHalo: Combat Evolved<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In Halo: Combat Evolved players assume the mantle of the Master Chief, a nearly seven-foot-tall enhanced soldier driven to a single, destructive purpose – the eradication of the murderously zealous alliance of alien races known as the Covenant. And that\u2019s pretty much what you spend more than half of the game doing as you blow up Grunts (tagging them with plasma grenades and watching them run about in a mad panic never gets old), destroy Elites and lay waste to hulking Hunters in increasingly large numbers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s during the \u2018Guilty Spark 343\u2019 mission, however, that everything gets turned upside down with the introduction of the Flood, an aggressive parasitic life form that intends to infect, corrupt and kill humans and Covenant alike. As such, Halo: Combat Evolved feels very much like a game of two halves in this sense and the reveal of the Flood as ultimately the primary antagonist of the whole affair was quite the shock when we played Halo: Combat Evolved for the first time nearly quarter of a century ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHalo 2<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Dovetailing straight into the revelation of the Flood as the new big baddies in Halo: Combat Evolved, 2004\u2019s Halo 2 seemingly once more centres on the Master Chief as the primary protagonist, this time pitting players up against not just the Flood, but also the newly revealed and divergent Brute wing of the Covenant, too. Where Halo 2 shifts things quite substantially from its predecessor, however, is that just before the halfway mark, Bungie\u2019s shooter sequel puts players into the alien boots of the \u2018Arbiter\u2019, a disgraced Covenant Elite tasked with retrieving the Guilty Spark and destroying both humankind and Flood alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Soon, the Arbiter and Master Chief realise that they have a common enemy in both the Flood and the overzealous Covenant Brutes and set about ensuring the downfall of both antagonists in earnest. To say that nobody expected to play as a Covenant Elite in a Halo game back in 2004, let alone one that would be a given dual-protagonist status with the Master Chief himself, would be quite the understatement indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMetal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Arguably defining the face of \u2018new stealth\u2019 in the late 1990s, Hideo Kojima\u2019s Metal Gear Solid very much made a gaming icon out of the main protagonist Solid Snake almost overnight. So imagine the surprise when the highly anticipated sequel, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, was unleashed on store shelves in 2001 and performed one of the industry\u2019s most infamous bait and switches, by sidelining the extremely popular Solid Snake extremely early on with the unknown – and back then markedly less cool\/interesting – Raiden for much of the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nStar Wars: Knights of the Old Republic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Set thousands of years before the events chronicled in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic ably fulfils that long-held fan dream of wanting to have the freewheeling agency that comes with stepping into the shoes of a Jedi Knight or a Sith Lord in a massive non-linear, multi-planet spanning RPG. With the player and their companions sent to destroy Darth Malak, it soon turns out that the player character is none other than an amnesic Darth Revan, the former master of Darth Malak and an extremely powerful Sith Lord in their own right. As plot twists go, this was an absolute doozy as it made you analyse every choice you had made right up until that point. A proper all-timer as far as video game plot twists go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe Last of Us Part I<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Starting with their initially borderline-hostile interactions in Naughty Dog\u2019s seminal post-apocalyptic survival horror, The Last of Us Part I beautifully depicts the maturing relationship between Joel and Ellie as it flourishes throughout all four seasons. As they travel across post-apocalyptic North America, they seek to use Ellie\u2019s immunity as a means to create a cure for the Cordyceps infection that has decimated humanity. With main protagonist Joel tragically losing his daughter during the game\u2019s opening act, we\u2019re provided with a foreshadowing of Joel’s state of mind and more importantly, the massive, daughter-shaped hole that lay in his heart that is slowly being filled as the pair inch towards the base of the rebellious Firefly faction that could synthesise a cure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, when Joel and Ellie finally reach the Firefly hospital base in Salt Lake City and Joel learns that Ellie won\u2019t survive the operation to create a cure for the Cordyceps virus, well, he goes off on one. In a real \u2018Are we the baddies?\u2019 moment, The Last of Us Part I has the player embark on a wholesale slaughter of just about everyone in the Firefly base – including Marlene, the regional leader of the Fireflies who tasked Joel to escort Ellie across the country in the first place. Perhaps worse still, Joel can\u2019t confront his deeds (or the original trauma) in the aftermath and subsequently lies to Ellie when she questions him and says that her blood simply wasn\u2019t viable for a cure for the Cordyceps infection. This was a massive, emotional gut-punch which entirely reframed how we perceived Joel as the primary protagonist of The Last of Us and more importantly, made us look into our hearts and minds, forcing us to confront the question of whether or not we would do the same thing in his situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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