After dedicating hours of your life grinding through a digital adventure, the credits finally roll. You should feel an immense sense of completion and closure, but you just can’t help sitting on your couch trying to wrap your mind around what just happened. Well my friend, you are not alone. There have been many complaints lobbied against video game narratives and they are not entirely unwarranted. Video gaming is still a fairly new medium for storytelling and being such, developers are still working out the kinks on what becomes feasible through a video game narrative.
The layer of interaction in a video game completely separates the medium from books or movies in terms of pacing and structure. While the interactivity gap hasn’t quite been resolved when it comes to putting together a truly well crafted video game story, the industry has certainly come a long way since the days of Atari blocks bumping into each other.
As you would expect, these stories don’t always land the exact way that the development teams want; leaving large swathes of gamers staring at end credits completely perplexed. There are specifically quite a few games that garner a negative reputation from being absolutely confounding when gamers attempt to unravel their plots. However, fear not, those criticisms are often overblown and unwarranted. So here are the 15 best examples of games that seem confusing, but are actually easy to understand. Buckle up, because from this point on there will be some spoilers for each entry listed.
15 Hotline Miami
Riding a wave of 80’s nostalgia and ultraviolence, Hotline Miami gathered critical acclaim as an indie darling. In Hotline Miami, players control a mysterious man in a letterman jacket that receives calls and voicemails forcing him to carry out hits on mafia members. Eventually the protagonist comes across others who have also received the disturbing calls, a biker and a man in a rat mask. The main story ends with a personal vindication for the protagonist, but no real conclusion as to who was making the calls. This is where the bonus levels, where you control the aforementioned biker, come into play. The biker hunts down the people making the calls and eventually discovers that the calls were coming from janitors in a hidden nightclub basement who were working for an organization known as 50 Blessings that were attempting to derail an alignment between the USA and the USSR.
14 Silent Hill
Silent Hill gave the world a taste of supernatural, psychological horror with their 1999 debut. In this first game, Harry Mason and his daughter Cheryl are in a terrible car crash that leads to Cheryl going missing in the titular town. The explanation of the town is where it throws most players off, but it’s not as complex as it would seem. You see, the town is cursed because a woman named Dahlia impregnated her daughter Alessa with a cult’s god. Alessa was burned in a fire, but due to the god in her, she survived, though her soul was split apart. The other half of her soul went into Harry Mason’s adopted daughter Cheryl, who was summoned back to Silent Hill by Dahlia. When spelled out on paper, it’s not as convoluted as you would think a cult would be.
13 Half-Life
The first game in the iconic series was fairly straight forward for the most part. Gordon accidentally unleashed aliens in a dimensional rift, he fights them off and travels to the alien world to close the rift. However, the end is where things take a turn for the confusing. A mysterious figure known as G-Man confronts Gordon with a job offer after explaining that he has been watching him. Accepting puts Gordon in stasis, while refusing is certain death. There’s a lot of mystery around G-Man’s motives, but from the sequels that came after we can infer what he meant at the end of the first entry. It would seem that the job offer for Gordon was to become some kind of weapon that can be woken from stasis at any moment and placed in a situation to get desired results for those who purchase the use of the tool.
12 Spec Ops: The Line
In this modern retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, we find our heroes in the middle of Dubai. As the story unfolds, our protagonists are subjected to greater and greater horrors which cause PTSD symptoms to develop in them, twisting the landscapes to nightmarish visions. Spec Ops: The Line is absolutely packed full of subtle and not-so-subtle imagery and symbolism that represent the main characters descent into PTSD. All of this is capped off with the realization that the man they have been hunting down has been dead the entire game. Due to the main character’s want to be a hero, he pushes forward and out of the bounds of his original mission, hurting the people of the city with the justification that it’s all for the greater good. At a point, we realize that the main villain isn’t a villain at all, he’s a coping mechanism.
11 The Evil Within
Upon The Evil Within’s release in 2014, one of the largest complaints was targeted at the narrative; specifically that it was nonsensical. However, the game goes out of its way to explain why the events of the plot can seem so off the wall and it makes perfect sense within the realm of the game. As it turns out, the main character Sebastian, along with his partners, are trapped in the mind of the game’s antagonist, Ruvik. This is why everything in the game bends to Ruvik’s will, because he literally created the world that the player is wandering around. It explains why he can destroy a city, teleport Sebastian wherever he wants, and seemingly change gravity at any moment; it’s not really happening. Shinji Mikami really flexes his psychological horror muscles in this outing and it makes perfect sense when you realize it’s not supposed to make sense.
10 Assassin’s Creed 2
In those early entries of Assassin’s Creed, Desmond would always have a lore bomb go off that set up interest for the sequel; none of them were as big as the end of Assassin’s Creed 2. At the finale of this game, Desmond is controlling his ancestor Ezio through the animus. As Ezio enters a vault in the Vatican, he is greeted by Minerva, a spirit from the first civilization, who talks through Ezio, through the animus, directly to a confused Desmond. This marked the first and only time any memory in the animus directly addressed Desmond. This was the perfect moment to build up the first civilization as a race of ultra wise and powerful deities. Of course, later on we realize that Minerva was always capable of contacting Desmond, she just chose that moment to flex her godlike power, as well as completely confuse poor Ezio.
9 Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty
Metal Gear Solid 2 (mostly) follows a new protagonist, Raiden, as he enters the Big Shell facility that is harboring a brand new Metal Gear weapon. While this seems straightforward enough, the game becomes increasingly strange until everything melts down in the final act, where Raiden ultimately sword fights the president on the roof of the capital building. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but I swear it makes sense in context. As it turns out, the whole Big Shell incident was a staged event in an attempt to recreate the events that occurred in the first Metal Gear Solid game. Essentially the whole game was an advanced training program, titled the Solid Snake Simulation, which was used to create modern super soldiers. However, this first trial run of the simulation goes haywire when the real Solid Snake shows up and throws the simulation out the window.
8 Life Is Strange
As a concept, time travel can be difficult to wrap your mind around, but DONTNOD’s Life is Strange uses that as its primary gameplay mechanic. Despite the disadvantages that time travel can have in a narrative, Life is Strange plays it relatively straightforward. Max can go back in time a matter of seconds or into snapshots of the past via photographs. The game becomes confusing when Max is confronted with the realities of the butterfly effect, the concept that if anything at all changes in the past, the future can be drastically altered. Because, as a concept, the butterfly effect is difficult to prove, we are asked to take the in-game explanations as fact, despite some of the reasoning being questionable. However, the game presents clear limits and rules to max’s powers that make what she is able to do in-game reasonable in the narrative that’s crafted.
7 Call of Duty: Black Ops
Call of Duty: Black Ops is seen as one of the bolder Call of Duty campaigns; taking confident leaps in storytelling with constant flashbacks, visions, and some unreliable storytelling from our protagonist, Alex Mason. Black Ops tries its hardest to deceive players at every turn. This is because we are playing the game through a man who has been reprogrammed through a torture camp to become a Russian plant in the US Army; a fear that was very prevalent amongst the Cold War. Treyarch is playing with the fears, expectations, and realities of severe PTSD paired with mental encoding to drop the player in the boots of a mentally unstable soldier that creates a persona to cope with his trauma. However, fans of the 1999 cult classic Fight Club will see this twist coming from a mile away.
6 Wolfenstein: The New Order
This franchise has seen several reboots and re-imaginings over the years, but most players will notice that Wolfenstein: The New Order is a little different. In The New Order, our protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz is already a grizzled war veteran who has seen a lot of action. He remains stone faced during all of the game’s crazy sci-fi and supernatural bends, as he even seems to recognize major characters despite us never seeing them before. The confusion sets in because a lot of clues would make the game seem like it’s a sequel. That’s because, it kind of is. The New Order takes from all the Wolfenstein games that came before, rather than tossing them out. So, in a way, we are seeing a BJ that has already been through all of those events and is basically a supersoldier; a Blazkowicz prime, if you want to get comic book nerdy about it.
5 Final Fantasy X
Despite this game’s high praise, FFX takes some turns that can make it hard for some players to follow. There’s a lot of in game explanation and fan theory, but we’ll keep it simple, just for you. In the land of Spira, there was once a city called Zanarkand that went to war. A summonor called Yu Yevon put the consciousness of everyone in the city into one mass that preserved the city forever in a dream state, while taking physical shape as Sin. Tidus, a resident of the dream consciousness, is pulled from Sin and into Spira where he must help a new summoner stop Sin. Ultimately Tidus realizes that to do that he has to destroy the collective consciousness, as well as his home and physical body, in order to do that. There we go, not too complex, right?
4 Dark Souls
When it comes to the wonderful, dark world of Hidetaka Mizayaki’s Dark Souls, ambiguous is the name of the game. Pretty much everything in the world is kept behind a veil and it is the player’s job to peak behind it. This is very much an intentional design choice on the creator’s part. Miyazaki has gone on record stating that he finds that a narrative is more fulfilling when players “themselves find out hints of plot from items or side-characters they encounter in the world.” This means that it is on the players to fill in all of the gaps of the story through collected items, NPC interactions, and surveying the design of the maps. Some could find this daunting, but when it comes to story it can actually be quite refreshing. As long as you get the main story beats, the devil in the details doesn’t exactly exist.
3 Kingdom Hearts
If there were ever a series that deserves to be on a list like this, it’s Kingdom Hearts. This Disney/Square Enix mash-up has become the poster child for overcomplicated plots; an image that can scare off a lot of potential players. However, we’re here to say that Kingdom Hearts is not really that complex. Just take the games one entry at a time, in the order they released, and everything fits perfectly fine. The game practically holds your hand and connects the dots for you in its insane plot line. The story of Sora, Riku, and Kairi extends across dozens of worlds and meets even more characters, but all of the themes and plots relate to each other. We’d definitely recommend checking these out, as it would take a separate list to spell out the plot even more than the games already do.
2 BioShock Infinite
The original BioShock contained a bombshell twist in the final act that changed the entire way you viewed the game. In the 2013 followup, BioShock Infinite, Irrational Games aimed to provide a similar style of twist; one that would reshape the way you viewed the game on future playthroughs. However, BioShock Infinite proved to be much more ambitious than the first entry. The game delved into the murky, ambiguous areas of alternate realities and time travel. Whenever a story in any medium dips a toe in those waters, a seemingly infinite amount of problems comes with it. It’s up to the game to highlight the questions that need to be answered in order to help the player understand. In the case of BioShock Infinite, the rules of Elizabeth’s time traveling and dimension jumping are spelled out perfectly well enough to form a cohesive story.
1 Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots
In a series as lengthy and absolutely bonkers as Metal Gear Solid, it should go without saying that putting every plotline to bed is going to need a lot of exposition. With the lengthy cutscenes that demand the player to have already experienced the previous entries beforehand, Metal Gear Solid 4 can be a daunting endeavor for casual players to step into. While there certainly are a lot of moving pieces in the game, we absolutely would not call this a confusing game as so many others like to label it. If you simply play the other games and pay attention to what goes on, then Metal Gear Solid 4 is guaranteed to answer more questions than it rises. Despite there being a Metal Gear Solid 5, make no mistake, Metal Gear Solid 4 is the final chapter and should be treated as such.
