The Best Video Game Stories That Mess With Your Head
Bioshock
It wouldn’t be a list of mind bending games without Bioshock and its unpredictable twist.
From the moment players emerge from their submersible into the ravaged city of rapture, they’re guided by the ever polite revolutionary Atlus.
Every command of where to go next, which players wouldn’t bat an eye at due to the norms of video game structure and design, is followed to the letter, and all the more easily thanks to Atlus’ regular “would you kindly” before them.
Once players reach the paranoid ruler of rapture, Andrew Ryan, though, the true meaning behind Atlus’ phrasing and presence becomes clear.
The player’s character was far from a stranger to Rapture. In fact, they were a genetically modified man made by Atlus to kill Andrew Ryan, hypnotized to follow any order that followed the phrase “Would you kindly.”
Every order given to the player flashes before their eyes, including Atlus’ most recent command to kill Andrew Ryan; and, as Ryan shows, he is more than capable of ensuring the command is carried out by his own word.
As Ryan tests the power of the hypnotic suggestion for himself, players are helpless to stop it, already caught in the machinations they themselves never realized. Instead of playing Bioshock, the game plays them.
