Game moments that shocked us: part 2 -.

Reading Psycho Mantis’ thoughts in Metal Gear Solid

Hideo Kojima’s polygon-based mindfuck in Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation) will forever be one of the absolutely most frantic and memorable gaming moments I have experienced. An iconic part of gaming history, I would dare to call it. Because I remember spending hours in some sort of perpetual hamster wheel of mindless toil, unable to crack Metal Gear boss Psycho Mantis in that dark brown room. It was his own words about reading Snake’s mind, his overconfident approach to the life-and-death battle we were engaged in that drove him to his own defeat, as I yanked the PSOne controller out of input one and instead plugged it into input number two, whereupon Mantis began ranting irritably about how he could no longer read my mind. This, of course, was as cleverly designed as it was shocking.

White phosphorus bombing in Spec Ops: The Line

Yager lulled me as a player into an almost mundane boredom, on purpose. Casual cover shooters in the most sterile and expected buildings, sand-brown desert environments in a bombed-out Dubai and waves of Call of Duty-scented enemies with a lack of intelligence. The developers used worn, simplistic ways of the genre to numb me to the point where I don’t even remember reacting when a video talked about a neighborhood being bombed with white phosphorus. It was the effect of the bombing – and the gameplay part where I had to walk through the bombed streets – that shocked on a level that few other games have. For it was civilians who had been bombed, who had been burned by the chemical warfare I had allowed minutes earlier. The moment when I stood and stared at a burned mother holding her child during the bombardment, dying that way – has stayed with me and is still one of the most terrible and powerful things I have experienced in a game.

The Marine Corps arrives in Half-Life

I distinctly remember how exhausted I was by the stress of always being on the run and by feeling constantly on the verge of failure. Gordon Freeman’s nightmarish afternoon at the top-secret Black Mesa research facility was full of deadly dangers and challenges that I could barely handle. That’s why it was such a liberating, exhilarating feeling to see a door burst open and U.S. Army Marines storm in for the second half of the adventure. Saved at last. Saved at last. But seconds later, it would turn out that the platoon of highly trained special forces soldiers were not there to rescue Freeman or his fellow scientists. They were there to “clean up” and began sawing off scientists with machine gun fire while I, as Mr. Freeman, stood on a ladder six feet above the scene and just stared, shocked as never before in a game.

The promise in The Last of Us

What Joel and Ellie have built over the course of Naughty Dog’s multi-award-winning, critically acclaimed and beloved original stands as the most humanly believable and emotionally effective relationship ever offered in a game. From reluctantly taking on the task of smuggling the wayward teenage girl out of Boston to building a sort of father/daughter relationship toward the end that would serve as a replacement for Joel’s real daughter, who died during The Last of Us’ intro. Of course, this was also why the tension was built as effectively as it was at the end, in the hospital, when Joel decided to kill all the Fireflies and take a stunned Ellie with him. The shock came later, however, when they stopped on the hill – a few miles from Jackson – and Ellie demanded the truth from Joel. When he swore (heartily) in the last sentence of the game that his necessary lie was exactly what had happened, the shock was total. Right? Wrong? Of course, leaving it open to interpretation there at the end was an incredibly good design decision.

You were the bad guy all along, in Braid

In the indie hit Braid, homeboy Jonathan Blow used packed game tropes to ultimately shock the player in the most effective ways. I remember actually finishing Braid purely based on Jonas Elfving’s perpetual whining about how good it was, despite never really liking the puzzles or the mushy graphic style. The whole thing about rescuing the game world’s 1242nd captive princess in the role of a costumed pygmy also didn’t feel like a driving force to me. When at the end it turned out that Braid was one long metaphor for psychological abuse and an abusive relationship, and that it was me (the “hero”) who had trapped the princess in the tower and that the villain I was chasing was actually the hero…. I remember how shocked I was. A wonderful twist.