10 Games Where You Don’t Realize You’re the Villain Until the End

Oftentimes in books, TV shows, and movies, the best parts of these stories are the sudden and surprising twists that completely reshape how audiences perceive everything that was shown or told before. Video games are filled with just as many exciting twists.

Some of the greatest twists in games appear near or during the end of single-player campaigns, with several games concluding with the shocking revelation that people were playing as the villains the entire time.

Here are 10 games which only reveal to players that they were embodying villains until the very end of their stories in shocking, unsettling, and thought-provoking ways that still resonate in people's minds years later.

10 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Who is Darth Revan?

BioWare is famous for its RPG titles such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age, but I'd argue that their greatest RPG is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, set roughly 4,000 years before the Star Wars films and centering around a Jedi Civil War led by Darth Revan and Darth Malak.

Most of the game is centered around a customized amnesiac Jedi and their allies fighting Darth Malak's forces while learning about Malak and Revan's past as former Jedi turned Sith warlords until near the end of the game, when it's revealed that the player-character is in fact Darth Revan, who survived an assassination attempt by Malak and was mind wiped by the Jedi.

Being an RPG, players can still act like heroic Jedi after the Revan revelation, but they can also embrace Revan's dark side past, defeat Malak, and regain control of the Sith fleet to destroy the Galactic Republic and dominate the galaxy with the power of the ancient Star Forge space station.

9 Call of Duty: Black Ops

Alex Mason's Loss of Free Will

The Call of Duty franchise isn't particularly known for its deep, thought-provoking narratives, but Call of Duty: Black Ops is a fantastic exception due to its campaign following the fractured mind of CIA operative Alex Mason during the Cold War in the 1960s.

After being captured by the Soviet Union following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Mason escapes thanks to help from former Red Army Sergeant Viktor Reznov and is sent on several missions across the globe to eliminate Soviet General Nikita Dragovich, Colonel Lev Kravchenko, and scientist Friedrich Steiner.

However, by the end of the game, it's revealed that Mason was brainwashed by both Dragovich and Reznoz to assassinate Kravchenko and Steiner, with the game ending with Mason seemingly getting over his Russian programming, only to conclude with Mason assassinating President John F. Kennedy.

8 Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

The Makings of a Vampire Lord

Konami's Castlevania series is one of the longest running game franchises of all time, with over 40 games being released since the late 1980s, but one of the most underrated entries in the franchise is the third-person action-adventure game Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

The first entry in a short-lived Castlevania reboot timeline, Lords of Shadow has players embody Gabriel Belmont in the 11th century as he sets out to defeat the supernatural Lords of Shadow and later Satan himself, but Belmont's story doesn't end in Shadow's base campaign.

In the DLCs Reverie and Resurrection, Belmont is forced to become a vampire to defeat the demonic Forgotten One and by the DLCs' end, it's revealed that Belmont succumbed to his dark vampiric nature and became the villainous Dracula, going on to feast on humans for centuries.

7 The Last of Us Part I

Dooming the World for Love

Among all of the game franchises Naughty Dog has ever created, The Last of Us is easily the darkest, with it being centered around the nature of humanity after most of civilization was destroyed by a Cordyceps outbreak that caused most humans to become zombie-like creatures.

In The Last of Us Part I, most of the game follows the smuggler, Joel, as he travels across the country with a young girl named Ellie in order to hopefully create a Cordyceps vaccine with a group called the Fireflies after Ellie is discovered to be immune to the fungal infection.

During their journey, Joel actually began to see Ellie as a sort of surrogate daughter and so fought his way through the Fireflies' facility and took Ellie away, dooming the world from receiving a cure for the zombie outbreak and ultimately leading Ellie to living a terrible life, as surviving Fireflies would exact revenge against both Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us Part II.

6 Spec Ops: The Line

Horrors of War

When 2K and Yager Development originally released Spec Ops: The Line in 2012, many thought it would be just another run-of-the-mill military shooter that was very common during the Seventh console generation. However, it turned out to be a far more complicated and serious game than its shooter counterparts.

Spec Ops: The Line starts out by following a small Delta Force spec ops team in Dubai as they're deployed to the city to search for survivors after the city became besieged by sandstorms and was taken over by a rogue U.S. Army battalion led by Lieutenant Colonel John Konrad.

Delta Force fights through the city, inadvertently killing dozens of civilians along the way, but by the end of the game, it's revealed that the player-character, Captain Martin Walker, had actually gone insane the entire time and used the actually dead Konrad as a way to excuse his horrible actions.

5 Prototype

The Origins of a True Villain

Activision is best known for overseeing the Call of Duty franchises today, but in the 2000s and early 2010s, they actually published a wide variety of games, with one of the best to feature a shocking twist ending being Radical Entertainment's Prototype.

Prototype begins with players embodying the amnesiac Alex Mercer as he, with his new deadly shapeshifting abilities, sets out to learn about his past while fighting Blackwatch soldiers and Blacklight virus-mutated civilians in New York City.

By the end of the game, however, it's revealed that Mercer was actually the scientist who created the Blacklight virus and, instead of becoming driven to wipe out the virus for good, he actually intends on enhancing the virus and infecting the entire world with it, becoming the main antagonist of Prototype 2.

4 Shadow of the Colossus

Restoring Life at a Terrible Cost

One of the most famous games that people can play where they don't realize they're the villain until the very end is Fumito Ueda's action-adventure masterpiece Shadow of the Colossus.

Shadow of the Colossus has people play a young man called Wander as he journeys to the Forbidden Lands where he's told by the entity Dormin to slay 16 massive colossi to resurrect his beloved Mono.

This isn't a simple save the damsel story though, as the colossi are actually peaceful creatures who defend parts of Dormin's malevolent soul, with each colossus' death resulting in Dormin increasingly possessing Wander's body until his death and Mono's tragic resurrection.

3 BioShock Infinite

An Endless Violent Cycle

One series that's full of iconic twists is 2K's BioShock. While the "Would you kindly" twist is arguably the series' most iconic, BioShock Infinite's final twist is the most shocking and complex.

BioShock Infinite initially begins with Booker DeWitt traveling to the floating country of Colombia to kidnap a girl called Elizabeth to clear his debts, only to get entangled in a civil war against Columbia's founder, Zachary Hale Comstock, and travel to alternate dimensions thanks to Elizabeth's supernatural Tear ability.

After Comstock is killed, Elizabeth reveals that Booker is actually a younger version of Comstock who causes war and destruction throughout the multiverse, forcing Elizabeth to drown Booker early in his life to prevent Booker's later life as Comstock from ever existing.

2 Braid

A Hero in Disguise

At first glance, Braid may seem to be just another indie 2D side-scroller. But as people actually play through Braid and begin to unravel its somewhat confusing story, they'll discover that the game is far more deep and tragic compared to most 2D titles.

In Braid, people play a man named Tim as he travels across numerous worlds striving to save a princess from a monster and fix their troubled past by using time-manipulation powers.

However, the final level of Braid actually reveals Tim to be the very monster the princess is trying to run away from all this time, with the two having previously been in an abusive relationship.

1 Silent Hill 2

James Sunderland's Monstrous Sins

Before BioShock and before KOTOR, there was one survival horror game that shocked gamers around with its shocking revelation that they were playing as the villain the entire time and that game was the atmospheric third-person masterpiece, Silent Hill 2.

Set in the titular, foggy, Maine-based town of Silent Hill, Silent Hill 2 follows James Sunderland as he travels to the town in search of his late wife Mary after receiving a letter urging him to find her there, only to find the town overrun with disturbingly grotesque monsters such as the giant knife-wielding Pyramid head and the four-legged Mannequins.

While Silent Hill 2 does have multiple endings, they all conclude with the revelation that Sunderland actually murdered his own wife and that all of the monsters of Silent Hill have been hallucinations created by his guilt for killing Mary.