Face Value or Sub-Text?

After finishing the Mass Effect Trilogy and filling my head with the Indoctrination Theory, I kept thinking about the idea of the face up value vs sub-text. A lot of games that are available today are simple games, what you see is what you get. Monsters are overrunning the Earth and you need to kill the Devil, ok no problem. Seems pretty simple. And you can find some games whose stories takes a few twists and some things are not as they first seem, for example…

[SPOILERS AHEAD! If you see the name of a game you don’t want spoiled, skip it! But there is another section after this.]

  • Portal 2 – One of the more obvious examples when you start out fighting your previous villain only to discover you’ve helped a worse villain.
  • Star Control 2 – You start out thinking you’re fighting to stop this evil race only to find out that they are doing what they are doing because they were burned pretty badly in the past, burned so bad that galaxy wide domination or annihilation is the only choice.
  • Borderlands – At the beginning, the vault is this huge treasure trove but at the end you realise it was a prison.
  • Knights of the Old Republic – You go hunting for a malevolent Sith Lord only to discover that you were the villain that lost his memory.
  • One Must Fall 2097 – You fight through all the tournaments to face the big boss and he’s not piloting his robot, he is his robot. It might sound lame but the idea floored me in 1994.
  • Starcraft – Include several twists including fighting for the wrong side, helping the bad guys and assisting the creators with an unholy experiment.
  • Halo – You try to find a way off the circular rock, come across a helpful AI only to realise you’ve helped it unleash a galaxy wide disaster.
  • Deus Ex – Fighting a global terrorist organization only to realise the real bad guys were the ones giving you orders.
  • Tachyon – At least in one scenario, you end up working and helping the people who framed you in the first place.
  • Oni – Fighting to stop a terrorist only to find out you’ve given them exactly what they wanted.

And I really think that the very best games are the ones that do it well, that give you such a good twist or a twist you were not expecting.

But after looking at all those, I have to differentiate. These are games in which the characters or the story are lying, misleading or not completely forthright and everything is revealed by the end game. And Mass Effect doesn’t really fall into that category, if you follow the Indoctrination Theory, that is. It falls into the category of the game lying or misleading you and it carries throughout the finale. Like that episode in Buffy that left you wondering if maybe this is all a dream or Blade Runner where you are not completely sure if Deckard is an Andy or not. I’m talking about a game that leaves an ending open to interpretation with the sub-text theory making it so much better than taking it face value. And I can’t think of any other game that does that.

If you have any suggestions or something that I’ve missed, I’d love to hear it.


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