Gaming Moments that Shocked Us: Part 2

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field

E-mail *

Name *

Psycho Mantis' mind reading in Metal Gear Solid

Hideo Kojima's polygon-based mindfuck in Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation) will forever stand as one of the absolute most frenetic and memorable gaming moments I've experienced. An iconic part of gaming history, I would dare to call it. Because I remember spending hours in a sort of perpetual hamster wheel of mindless drudgery, unable to crack Metal Gear boss Psycho Mantis inside that dark brown room. It was his own words about reading Snake's mind, his overconfident approach to the life-and-death struggle we were fighting that drove him to his own defeat, because I yanked the PSOne controller out of input one and stuck it into input number two instead, whereupon Mantis began to rant irritably about how he could no longer read my mind. This was, of course, 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 of premises, sandy-brown desert settings in a bombed-out Dubai and waves of Call of Duty-scented enemies with a lack of intelligence. The developers used well-worn, simplistic mannerisms of the genre to numb me to the point where I remember not even reacting when a cutscene talked about a neighbourhood being bombed with white phosphorus. It was the effect of the bombing - and the gameplay portion 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 to death by the chemical warfare I had authorised minutes before. The moment where I stood and stared at a burnt mother holding her child during the bombing, and died that way - has stayed with me and is still one of the most horrible and powerful things I have experienced in a game.

The Marine Corps arrive in Half-Life

I remember very well how exhausted I was by the stress of always being on the run and by the feeling of constantly being on the verge of failure. Gordon Freeman's nightmarish afternoon inside the top-secret Black Mesa research facility was packed with 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 latter half of the adventure. Rescued at last. Rescued at last. But it would turn out seconds later that the platoon of highly trained special forces soldiers were not there to rescue either Freeman or his fellow scientists. They were there to 'clean up' and started sawing down scientists with machine gun fire while I, as Mr Freeman, stood on a ladder six metres above the scene and just stared, shocked like never before in a game.

The promise in The Last of Us

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

You were the bad guy all along, in Braid

In the indie hit Braid, homeboy Jonathan Blow used wrapped game tropes to ultimately shock the player in the most effective of ways. I remember basically finishing Braid purely on the strength of Jonas Elfving's eternal nagging about how good it was, despite never really liking the puzzles much or the mushy graphical style. The whole thing with rescuing the 1242nd captured princess of the game world in the role of a costumed pygmy didn't feel like a driving force for me either. When it turned out at the end that Braid was one long metaphor for psychological abuse and an abusive relationship, and that it was I (the 'hero') who had locked 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.